Willy’s Chocolate Experience should have wowed the children of Glasgow. Instead it was so bad it became an instant classic – unlike this overblown documentary
This is a real documentary. I point this out because it sounds like a spoof TV listing. If you’ve glanced at the internet recently, and I mean recently, you will have seen the TikToks and Reels and memes documenting a world of less-than pure imagination (or “imagnation”, as one of the posters for the event had it), for which punters in Glasgow paid £35 a ticket. They were promised a “Willy’s chocolate factory”, but what transpired was internet infamy. They found sad Oompa Loompa-type figures, in a too-big, melancholy, cavernous old factory space, hung with limp decorations and a cardboard chocolate river, adrift in all that vastness, and the whole thing became notorious in an instant. “I am the viral Oompa Loompa,” began one of the viral videos, with hilarious solemnity.
When it happened, five minutes ago, it struck that rare collective chord, uniting internet users for the briefest moment. It was an instant classic, so bad it was funny. Of course, the British have loved a dodgy Winter Wonderland story for years, but fake Wonka’s shame became the world’s joy. US chatshow hosts and news anchors were talking about it. Karen Gillan asked to be cast in an adaptation of it. (She should be careful what she wishes for – there is already a planned stage musical in the works.) Keir Starmer even worked it into PMQs. That should have been the death knell, but Channel 5 has decided it is up for milking it even further, and has turned the whole thing into an hour-long documentary. Unsurprisingly, it has the strong whiff of someone vastly overexplaining the joke. Next up, a 12-episode Ken Burns series on the Distracted Boyfriend meme?
Wonka: The Scandal That Rocked Britain aired on Channel 5.
