What does a bomb-disposal expert make of Bodyguard?
Security professionals tell how it’s done in real life
In Sunday’s final episode of Bodyguard, David Budd woke up in the middle of London wearing a suicide belt operated by a “dead man’s switch”. Were he to lift his thumb, the bomb would explode killing everyone in the surrounding area. It was an agonisingly tense scene.
But how realistic was it? The Daily Telegraph asked a leading security specialist, a former crisis negotiator and Britain’s first female bomb disposal officer how they would handle the situation.
The police were quick to move Budd to a more isolated area, but saving his life was low on their list of priorities. This part rang true, according to Brunel University’s intelligence expert Dr Kristian Gustafson. “You’ve got to pretty much presume that the man with the bomb on him is a dead man. He’s got a bomb on him – that’s not coming home,” explains Gustafson, who’s a former Canadian Army officer.
“You’ve got to assume that it could go off any second, so you mitigate hard: clear the area, contain it. Only once everyone else is safe, and the harm is minimised to the guy wearing the device, that’s when you’d call in the ammunition technical officers to defuse it.”
The type of explosive makes no difference – it’s motivation that matters. “If a guy’s hostile with an IED [improvised explosive device], kill him, whether it’s a dead man’s switch or not,” says Gustafson. “But if you’ve got someone going, ‘I’m trapped in this bomb, I don’t want to do this,’ that’s a different scenario.”
Cathy Macdonald is a former crisis negotiator who spent more than 30 years in the Scottish police. She’s also a Bodyguard fan, having been won over by a scene in the first episode where Budd seemingly convinced a suicide bomber to back down.
“I was impressed with what he did in that situation,” says Macdonald. “A lot of reassurance, a lot of connection. He recognised she was isolated and needed help. I thought the writers had been quite well advised.”
But if Budd was a good example of how to speak to someone with their finger on a red button, the police officers who confront him in the finale were a textbook example of what not to do.
“Budd was showing heartfelt and clear communication, but they weren’t listening,” says Macdonald. Things got worse when they brought another voice into the conversation: “The arrival of his wife was so flawed and high risk it had to be for dramatic effect only.”
Lucy Lewis was the first British woman to work as a bomb disposal officer. “It’s a rule that you never do the same thing twice,” she says. “The vest bomb in the first episode was dealt with by cutting the straps, and the one in the finale was made by the same bomb-maker – but they had booby-trapped the straps.”
It was a believable development, she explains. “It’s always an arms race. If they realise you’re using a metal detector, they’ll make it out of wood.”
Though Lewis never worked in this kind of high-threat situation, she has first-hand experience of defusing Second World War bombs. The Germans used similar tactics, she says; after learning that the British were pulling out their fuses, from around 1940 they started placing anti-withdrawal traps underneath.
Bodyguard’s bomb disposal operative made a few basic mistakes, says Lewis. “The operator would not have gone straight for the bright shiny screws on the cover, as these look like a come-on.
“He would have used a robot to do the initial recce, and not have taken two team members that close – particularly as he had complete freedom to move round Budd. He would not have made Budd turn round, but would have circled him.”
Lewis is often bothered by Hollywood clichés about her line of work. She gave up on The English Patient when she reached its famous wire-cutting scene. “I got very shouty at it. It’s an iron bomb – they didn’t cut those wires in 1940, let alone now.
But Bodyguard was better than most, she says. “Overall, it was one of the better on-screen bomb disposal scenes I’ve seen – so I could enjoy the plot without getting overly annoyed by the obvious errors.”