It is the first crisp, sunny day of autumn and I am searching for bottles of urine in a bush by the side of the road. I have already found my first, a Lucozade bottle filled with a liquid the colour of honey, when Oobah Butler calls me from New York. He has just found a bottle of urine of his own. “Yeah, that’s a bad one,” he says, showing me over video. “You can see all the oxygen has gone out of it, so it’s all dark.” How would he describe the colour of it exactly? “Ah, hmm. Good question. ‘Soy sauce sachet.’”
Butler has become something of a urine expert over the past two years. The former Catfish UK presenter is best known for his elaborate prank films made with Vice. The Shed at Dulwich, the caper where he turned the south London shed in which he was living into London’s highest-rated restaurant by gaming the TripAdvisor algorithm, is the one that most often gets him stopped in the street (“You’re that shed guy, right?”). But this week, he is branching out with his first Channel 4 special, The Great Amazon Heist. It sees Butler take his outlandish do-anything-for-the-bit pranking style and apply it to a bigger story – Amazon, the biggest retailer on Earth, and the human cost of running a one-day delivery service that people feel guilty for using but end up using anyway – with a combination of legal one-upmanship, undercover investigation and poking his tongue out at Jeff Bezos.
