The great British prank is a dying art form. Gone are the days when you couldn’t move for hoax interviews or wind-up phone calls or fake anti-drug campaigns or gigantic pretend mobiles. It’s not just due to a national vibe shift: a Channel 4 executive recently claimed that new Ofcom rules mean programmes that deliberately fool people are effectively banned. Honestly, it’s fundamentally humane treatment of the general public gone mad!
The fact TV comedy is no longer relying on the humiliation of unsuspecting passersby (or, for that matter, wilfully naive politicians and celebrities) is a blessing for those of us who simply can’t handle the stench of secondhand embarrassment. Yet whatever your levels of prank-aversion, you may still find something to enjoy in the work of Oobah Butler. The self-styled “professional chancer” found fame in 2017, when he tricked Tripadvisor into crowning his nonexistent restaurant The Shed at Dulwich (a literal shed at the bottom of his south London garden) the top dining destination in London by gaming his ratings. Butler tends to fool institutions (or algorithms) rather than individuals, which means his pranking style is practically victimless and strangely feelgood. It also means he is allowed to do it on TV.
So what better focus for the internet stuntman’s first ever show than Amazon? The e-commerce behemoth avoids tax and has been repeatedly accused of exploiting workers – a target even the most delicately dispositioned empath couldn’t object to. We open with a shot of Butler sniffing discarded bottles of urine outside a delivery centre. It’s an arrestingly nauseating image and a neat memory aid for his motivating principle: Amazon has been brazenly “taking the piss” for ages, so why shouldn’t our host do the same?
Yet the wee is put on ice, without any explanation. Instead, Butler decides to find out what it’s like to work for Amazon. When employees tell him they’re too scared to talk, he’s left with only one option: go method. Posing as the brunette, bespectacled Paul, he lands a job at the Coventry fulfilment centre and sneaks a camera past the disturbingly intense security by claiming he has a “pelvic screw”. What he presents is evidence of unregulated working temperatures, physical pain for even the newest of recruits, claims that the company is deploying shady tactics to prevent unionising – although Amazon denies allegations of poor working conditions. Very quickly, he finds himself a victim of his own notoriety when he’s recognised by bosses (accidentally introducing himself to his colleagues as Oobah on day one probably didn’t help) and makes a hasty exit.
It’s not the blow it might have been: Butler’s bone-dry comic stylings and tendency to play the buffoon don’t naturally pair with a serious human rights exposé. His own unmasking allows him to move on to more jocular territory. First comes his trademark move: gaming Amazon’s product league tables by repurposing that aforementioned abandoned wazz – a result of delivery drivers a) not being allowed toilet breaks and b) not being allowed bottles of urine in their vehicles – into a #1 ranking drink on the site (subcategory: Bitter Lemon). Then, in a properly laugh-out-loud segment, he enlists his extremely enthusiastic four- and six-year-old nieces to order multiple knives, saws and packets of rat poison using an Alexa (the four-year-old: “It’s a knife party!”). The result is a nightmarish haul that suggests Amazon flout age-verification laws on dangerous products.
There is a scattershot quality to this array of minor gotchas, and it soon dawns on you that despite the title, there is no actual heist, just a man in wry battle with an entity that seemingly cannot be held to account (that said, the knife party stunt does prompt Amazon to reclassify four products – and they say they take age verification extremely seriously). Butler’s pièce de résistance, however, is still very satisfying. If the company didn’t use Luxembourg as a tax haven, says Labour MP Nadia Whittome, we might have more funding for schools and hospitals – and road maintenance (after all, how would all those deliveries happen without state-funded roads?). So Butler orders some pothole filler from Amazon, gets a builder to fix the holes, restocks the boxes with sand and gets a full refund.
Punctuating these pranks is an extended consultation with a lawyer, who advises Butler on the legality of his stunts. As a framing device, it feels forced and hammy, but it’s worth it for the eventual payoff. Apparently, conning Amazon out of pothole filler is an imprisonable offence, but Butler has a final trick up his sleeve to give them a taste of their own medicine – something that leaves even the cartoonishly disapproving lawyer grinning.
It’s a small win – a very small win. These are not the sort of breakthroughs that will puncture Amazon’s influence or even vaguely trouble them, and Butler knows it. In exchange for this hour of funny and impishly creative, if not particularly hard-hitting, programming, he implores the viewer to think about where their consumer power is directed. The Great Amazon Heist may not have revealed any unexpected horrors, but through a combination of comedy and idiosyncratic con artistry, it does make our existing suspicions far harder to ignore.
• The Great Amazon Heist is on Channel 4.
