Séamas O'Reilly: I would have paid to bear witness to the disaster that was the Willy Wonka Experience
'Part of me would have given anything to have been in their place.' Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
There are few genres of news more warming to my blackened heart than the “Crap Wonderland”.
You know the kind of thing; images in local newspapers of people bearing tickets and sad-faces interspersed with abysmal shots of an Easter Egg Hunt that looks like a dystopian holding camp in a Half Life game; a Winter Wonderland attraction featuring a plastic snowman and a single, sad reindeer roped to a port-a-loo; a Disney Experience featuring a hungover lady wearing Elsa from Frozen’s dress over her own clothes, selling non-Disney merch featuring the minions and Paw Patrol.
Well, lovers of this oeuvre were treated handsomely this week when news of a Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow started trickling online.
From the outset, even seasoned connoisseurs like myself knew we’d hit upon something special.
This was truly, even by the standards of such things, an absolute Category 5 disaster.
Billed as “celebration of chocolate in all its delightful forms”, it was instead a barren warehouse filled with tables, a bouncy castle, and some standees of plastic chocolate bars.
Where one might have expected an ornate chocolate fountain, or a complex system of pipes and tubing, there was instead an entirely open plan rectangle of cement loosely dotted with large plastic flowers and individual lengths of piping, each so distant from each other that the affect was infinitely more tragic than if no effort had been made at all.
There were striped sheets hanging from clothes lines.
At a bar by a far wall, a woman dressed as an Oompa-Loompa stood in front of a small, science-tinted apparatus made from glass, which it was claimed would help her make chocolate.
If this all seems rather detached from the traditional iconography of the Wonka universe, worse was to follow.
Video emerged of an actor playing Willy Wonka, bidding children toward a mirror, behind which lurked a mysterious and objectively terrifying masked figure, who appeared to have very little connection to any Wonka mythos yet described.
The event closed a few hours after it had started. Refunds were made, but punters continued to arrive, having paid up to £35 each for entry, and some having travelled from as far afield as Newcastle and Fife. Reaction was swift, and punishing.
One of the actors himself, Paul Connell, took to TikTok to explain his side of the story, with enough good cheer that it’s hard to feel anything but empathy for his situation.
Promised an event more in keeping with the bold promises of its organisers, he arrived to find nothing had materialised — even down to the treats to offer, since he was told to give each child a single jelly bean and a quarter cup of Tesco’s own-brand lemonade.
A celebration of chocolate in all its delightful forms then, except in the form of any actual chocolate.
i’m crying at the extended footage pic.twitter.com/KSaAMTBNkp
— Brooklyn (@bklynb4by) February 29, 2024
In the week before the event, Connell also says he was given a monologue to learn which he now describes as “15 pages of AI-generated rubbish”.
If you’re disappointed that I’m somehow talking about AI scams again after the past few weeks, imagine the horror I feel myself.
Here I am, finally getting to spread the word about my fondness for Crap Wonderlands, and artificial intelligence rears its head once more.
In fairness, it should have been clear from the event’s flyer, which showed picture-book rendering of a chocolate wonderland so lifeless and shiny, it was unmistakeably inhuman in origin.
If that weren’t enough, the garbled text put it beyond all doubt, promising “encherining” entertainment, “catgatating. live performances” and “exaserdray lollipops”.
I’ve now seen this script the actors were given to work off, and can confirm that the flyer was merely the tip of the exaserdray iceberg.
It contains insane surplus details of original Wonka lore.
The above-mentioned masked figure is, apparently, an “evil chocolate maker” who “lives in the walls” and had stolen Wonka’s “anti-graffiti gobstopper”, a nebulously described sweet which — in a huge shout for a spectacle aimed at children — tidies bedrooms, somehow.
Mostly, the script gestures toward an experience vastly different to that which visitors encountered on the day.
There are references to glowing orbs, complex tunnels and sophisticated audiovisual displays.
Stage directions describe “giggling grass”, which triggers laughter from hidden speakers when you walk on it, and animatronic flowers which turn and greet you when you say hello.
Such effects would be impressive feats of staging for a moderately-sized West End spectacular, let alone a cold, barren cuboid in a Glasgow industrial estate.
It’s almost as if AI’s main benefit is barfing out plausible-seeming “art” and “ideas” for the benefit of people too cheap to hire artists, too uncreative to generate concepts themselves, and too lazy to be trusted with the task of turning such meaningless barf into reality for an entrance fee of £35.
subsequently revealed that organiser Billy Coull has form in this regard, uncovering his “authorship” of 16 AI-generated books that were released on Amazon last summer, with conspiratorial and anti-vax themes.
Since laughing at it all seemed unseemly to some people, many prefaced their comments about the Glasgow Wonka experience by saying how sorry they felt for the poor parents and kids affected.
I agree wholeheartedly, but part of me would give anything to have been in their place.
My feelings about AI charlatans are, I’d imagine, tediously apparent by this stage. I also treasure the happiness of my children, and sums of money up to and including £35, but I must also admit I’d happily trade both for an afternoon just so I could have stood in the face of this unfolding disaster to drink it all in at the source.
A whimsical factory tour that ended up as a metaphor for greed, spite, and the largesse of technology in late capitalism.
A trip through a magical wonderland that ended with horrible fates for children, adults, and workers alike.
Perhaps the Glasgow Wonka Experience was a more faithful Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptation than anyone intended.
