Look Mum I'm on TV - Turning Up the Amps on Reality TV

About this episode

The early podcasts got a response I genuinely didn't expect, so thank you for that. This one is about a question people always ask once they find out what we do. How did E-Stim kit end up on television? The answer involves more reality TV than you'd think.

In this episode

I talk about the telly work, the shows our gear has quietly turned up on, and what it's like making equipment that ends up in front of cameras. Turning up the amps on reality TV, basically, with nobody at home realising what they were looking at.

Listen: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · or press play above.

Full transcript

Hello everyone. It's Wayne here from E-Stim Systems and welcome to yet another one of my little podcasts. The first thing I'd like to do is thank you all from the bottom of my heart everyone who's listened to the last couple of podcasts, because the responses have been astronomical. We decided to do these podcasts as a bit of fun and it's something that we haven't done before. Honestly, the response I've got it's been fantastic.

Looking at people's comments, ideas, everything, everything it's just astounding how popular these podcasts are turning out to be. So the good news is we're going to carry on. We're going to try and get them a little bit more regular, so hopefully they're going to be weekly and we have a pile of interesting bits and pieces coming up. But the topic of this week's podcast is look, "mum, I'm on TV Now.

That's going to be a really strange title for a podcast from e-stim Systems, but it is actually quite relevant because and I'll give you a bit of history here back in 2008 and I know that's quite a long time we were shopping in Tesco's, my wife and I, and we had a phone call. Now, at the time, we were running the business from home, from work. It was a 24-7 scenario and therefore, when people phoned up the office phone, it would divert to a mobile and we would generally answer it.

Now this was a weekend and we had a phone call. Unfortunately, because we were shopping, we didn't catch the phone call and it went to voicemail. So we did the usual thing we pressed the buttons on the phone and tried to read the voicemail. Unfortunately, the voicemail didn't work. It was like OK, if it's important, they're ring back. Luckily, they didn't ring back. What they actually did was they sent an email at the same time.

So if you can't get a hold of us on the phone, always, always, always, send us an email. But the contents of this email was from a very strange company called Endemol and was asking about 12 remotes. Now, one thing that happened in the UK around about that time was something called Big Brother. Big Brother was one of these reality TV shows where they stuck a whole load of people in a house and recorded them 24-7 doing silly things.

Every so often someone would be thrown out of the house and they would win something, normally a big sum of money. They've done quite a few Big Brothers around the world. They've done quite a few celebrity Big Brothers, but this one was important for us because it was the first time we had been approached by a TV company about using our products on TV. What do you mean? You're going to use your E-Stim products on TV? This is not porn. This is not a porn channel. This is national TV.

Let me explain what they were doing. They were looking for some way of zapping, ie electrocuting their contestants during a challenge, which, if you think about it, is not unusual.

The challenge actually was one of these copper pipe things where you had a ring and you moved the ring around all the curves on the copper pipe and if you made a ring and you moved the ring around all the curves on the copper pipe and if you made a mistake, it would go and in this case you would get zapped or you wouldn't get zapped, the contestants would get zapped. Actually, there was a little bit of a twist because it wasn't the person doing the ring, it was all their friends would get zapped.

Quite an interesting little twist. Anyway, we had this email we had this conversation about could we provide 12 of these units? We sort of put two and two together and worked out this might actually be Big Brother, considering the numbers, the TV company and also the fact they wanted them delivered local to us, to a TV studio. We signed an NDA. We managed to sell them the remotes and they appeared on Big Brother. I say managed to sell them.

Their first approach was actually they wanted us to give them the remotes in exchange "experience" experience. Now, these days, unfortunately, we have quite a lot of so-called influencers from Instagram or Facebook or just social media in general who try this one on and do the well, I'll give you lots and lots of exposure. You give me free product.

Generally, that doesn't work, for us believe have real value to our community and have already demonstrated that by the fact that they've actually got material out there that is relevant and interesting and all is well and good. Unfortunately, none of us can actually eat exposure. None of us can pay the bills with exposure. So when we get asked, no matter who you are, we're always going to turn around and go. Really?

The other common one with this is we TV companies companies turning around to us and saying 'but I have no budget'. The bit they forget is they're TV company and they have millions of pounds in the budget and they have no budget to purchase our products. Really, five minutes later they come back with the credit card details. But anyway, we sold them 12 of these remotes, and the first Big Brother that we were involved with was a fantastic success. It was hilarious. They had them dressed up in shiny suits.

Every time they got zapped they would jump up and round. They would scream. It was fantastic. Incidentally, the remotes were actually connected to a belt they were wearing and then the pads were actually on the buttocks. So nothing sexual, it was purely and simply getting zapped. One thing they don't tell you when you look at the TV is I wouldn't say it was fixed, but there was a little bit of jiggery, pokery with the technology.

Our Remotes do allow one single key fob to control every single remote, so you can set up 12 remotes to run off a single key fob. You press the fire on the single key fob and 12 people get zapped. The problem is 12 people's reactions to the same level aren't going to be the same, so one person might sit there going, oh that's nice, and the other person might be jumping up and down. So what we had to do is set up 12 individual key fobs to set the levels for each individual person.

And then one of the producers had a master key fob which would fire them all off at the same time. It wasn't directly connected to the rings. A lot of people thought it was and subsequently, when we've done other tv shows, they've assumed it was because they've sort of gone well, can you get it to connect to this, that and the other? And the answer is no. That was actually the production team literally just waiting for the buzzer to go off and then they would press the button zap brilliant, fantastic show.

Six months later, we get another phone call, not from big brother well, not from Big Brother in the UK, but from Big Brother in Australia and they wanted to effectively repeat the same thing. And this happened quite a few times, and I think at the moment we're up to about 15 different Big Brothers who have basically used our kit to zap their contestants. Why are they using our kit? Why aren't they using the competitors? Why aren't they using other stuff out there?

Well, some of the companies do use other kits, but one of the things we've noticed is the runners. Now, runners are the people who basically run around and do all the jobs that nobody else does on a TV show, from getting the coffee to phoning up E-Stim companies and asking if they can have kit. They're the ones who will interface between the producers and the suppliers. So the runners are generally freelancers and they'll work from company to company.

They'll have a successful show on Big Brother 2008, and they'll go and move on to another show and they'll bring their expertise and their skills and their ideas and their contact list to the new company. So we ended up doing quite a few Big Brothers and then we started doing other shows. Now we've got a whole list of shows that we've worked at. Ant and Dec. If you're in the UK, you know exactly who Ant and Dec is. I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of here which was down in the jungle in Australia.

We did try and get down to Australia. We told them they really needed to send us to be their technical advisors, but for some reason they said no. But we've done quite a few TV shows, Caz, incidentally, my wife wife actually met Ant and Dec for another reason in 2016 and mentioned the fact that we manufactured these zap things that they'd been experiencing on their shows and they were like are they gonna get? Are we having them again? No, please don't stop doing it.

Another time we had to do a show with a guy called Chico. Chico was a musician who was quite famous at the time with Chico Time, and we had to do a show where we were zapping two or three contestants when they were asking certain questions. The problem with this particular show was it was an environment where it was very, very radio intense. There was a lot of radio mics going on and although our units don't interfere with radio mics, they're using a regulated legal frequency.

If you're in an environment which has interfere with radio mics, they're using a regulated legal frequency. If you're in an environment which has lots of radio mics and bits and pieces going on, it just swamps everything out and the remotes just don't work that well. So if you're going to do tv, you need to come up with some method of getting them to fire. What it was was me sitting on the front row of the audience with a remote control zapping the individuals when they answered the wrong question.

It was an interesting day. I got some very strange looks from the audience because they were all getting into the show and I'm just concentrating on whether I'm actually going to press the button at the right time. And I did get to meet Chico, who's a great guy.

Now, one of the things I did mention is the fact that we had to sign NDAs and some of the companies that we worked with still have those NDAs in place, so we can't actually say who they are or what they did, but most of the time it's quite obvious, because half the time they put the remotes on places where you can see them and then they publish YouTube videos and things. If you go on our YouTube channel you can see a few of them in action.

The other thing that we found with some of the companies is they would approach us to write their risk assessment, which is really quite a bizarre idea. Would approach us to write their risk assessment, which is really quite bizarre idea. But their insurance company saw us as the experts with the company manufacturing these. We've been manufacturing them now for 20 odd years, therefore we do know some of the risks and the potential pitfalls.

The interesting thing was their insurers then spoke to our insurers, who phoned us up and said do you have a risk assessment? And bear in mind this was the same day, I think, that we'd written the original risk assessment for the TV company. We said is this in relation to X company. And they went, yes, it is. And we wrote yeah, we wrote the risk assessment for that company.

And they were like, okay, because we've just been approached by their insurers to clarify the risk assessment that you wrote is the same as the risk assessment that you have. Yeah, is the same as the risk assessment that you have. Yeah, it's the one that we wrote for them because it's based on our risk assessment. Okay, yeah, no, that's not a problem, because we consider you to be the experts. Anyway, the other thing that's happened a couple of times is they've said we want the silver suits as well.

And I'm like, yeah, we don't make the silver suits, we just do e-sim kit. We don't do silver costumes. You and they're like, oh, okay, fine, and they do. We still continue to do TV companies. We still have feedback from TV companies Because we still offer a lifetime guarantee on units. We have had units come back that have been used in the past on other TV shows and somehow have gone down the line to a new TV show and they phoned us up and said can you do renovations on this, can you make sure everything's working?

And it's like, yeah, yeah, no problem, we can do that, we can sort that out for you. So that is how e-stim systems got on tv and continues to be on tv, not just in the uk. We've probably done about 20 or 30 countries now in some very obscure ones, and sadly they're not sending me out to fly and be the expert on these shows. They just buy the kit and ship it out to them. If you want any E-Stim kit for tv shows, don't forget you can contact us. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Hopefully you've learned something and it's been entertaining. I've certainly enjoyed doing this and please, as this is a podcast, please consider leaving us a review. It would be great to hear what you think of us on the Spotify's and the Apple podcasty things that's going on, but please, whatever you do, be safe and enjoy yourself. Bye.