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.
“Got another one here – actually, there’s a bag full of them,” he tells me. “I’m not going through that.” The Great Amazon Heist started out as a fairly small idea – try to protest the level of taxes Amazon pays by taking advantage of a loophole in its returns system – but as Butler spent more time obsessing over the company (including going undercover at its Coventry distribution centre), it became clear he had to jab it harder than doing a bit of returns manipulation.
In the three days he spent on site in disguise before being rumbled, he encountered workers in pain from the hours spent on their feet and a dehumanising surveillance system, and he spent an afternoon stacking an unventilated van in exhausting heat (Amazon deny the allegations of poor working conditions: “Nothing is more important than the safety and wellbeing of our employees.”) He also found that drivers were working long, target-based hours without time to find and use facilities, so were resorting to using empty bottles to urinate in. At some centres, any urine bottles found in distribution vans would lead to a penalty that could lead workers to be fired, so these bottles often end up thrown out on the road a few hundred metres from the Amazon facility, such as the one I’m scouring around in Bromley by Bow. Butler – at the distribution centre in Queens, as he works in New York on his next film – is out-hunting me eight bottles to three. “There’s another one,” he says, focusing the camera so I can see it glisten in the sun. “The colour is … ‘Edinburgh festival cider’.”
It is ironic that, at the start of filming at least, Butler was still a fairly ardent Amazon customer. “I was talking about it to my German teacher, and she said: ‘Oh, so you’re still using Amazon? So you’re a hypocrite then?’ And I was really defensive. I just had to let that sit with me.” After spraying his blond hair brown, donning a pair of glasses and introducing himself as ‘Paul’, he worked two (and a half) shifts at the distribution centre in Coventry. He says it was seeing those conditions first-hand that changed his buying habits for good. “There was one point where I got my phone out to check the time, and someone said: ‘Listen, you can’t do that: you’ll literally lose your job.’” His hiring there was fortuitously timed – after long-term workers started efforts to unionise, a huge influx of temporary workers on student contracts were hired, possibly to dilute the union voting base – and Butler was one of just two hires who weren’t on the student contract and wage. “I ended up being there at the height of it. It was a bizarre feeling – you know you’re trying to do this film as entertainment, but it’s using entertainment to try and do things. But it’s a hard juggling act because it’s not really funny, and this is people’s lives. I think what I can do is use comedy and stunts to illuminate stuff that people have switched off from.”
There is a sequence in the new film that is likely to switch people who have grown weary of caring about Amazon back on again: when Butler recruits his two adorable young nieces to buy knives and gardening saws by gleefully yelling their order into an Alexa (I’ve been repeating their euphoric chant “Knife party! Knife party!”, all week since watching the film). It’s a very Oobah Butler moment – a combination of unbelievable, funny and quite scary – and is likely to make the company squirm. “The stuff with the nieces is obviously the most difficult and sensitive moment in the film, because it has massive implications for people,” he says. “Obviously, I ordered a lot of them as well, but if you don’t age-verify at the point of purchase it doesn’t matter how old someone is – it has to be verified.” (Amazon says: “We take our responsibility to carry out age verification extremely seriously.”) But Butler compares allowing unverified purchases via voice command to just letting his nieces run riot in a shop. “That’s what it is! Imagine a four-year-old and a six-year-old walking into a shop, leaving their money on the counter, and walking out with whatever they want. That’s basically what Amazon has enabled them to do!”
The Great Amazon Heist is on Channel 4 on 19 October at 10pm.
