The art of the prank is long and venerable. It dates back to the days of the Roman empire, when the March equinox would be accompanied by outlandish disguises, and was carried, like a flame, through medieval France (where particularly gullible victims were branded with a paper fish, a poisson d’avril) to Georgian Britain, which sequestered a whole day, 1 April, for the purpose. Now, after a 21st century spent terrorising stuffed-shirted boomers, the prank has become political, elaborate, and entered not just the world of YouTube and TikTok, where it is ubiquitous, but Channel 4. That’s where you’ll find The Great Amazon Heist, the latest primetime practical joke.
The Dennis the Menace figure at the heart of The Great Amazon Heist is self-described “professional chancer” Oobah Butler. Butler gained a following after embarking on a series of homespun but sensational pranks – such as turning his garden shed into TripAdvisor’s top-rated restaurant – that bordered on performance art. Now he’s taking on retail giant Amazon in a tripartite “heist”. The first prank is to turn bottles of Amazon delivery drivers’ urine (yes) into a bestselling energy drink, a feat which is followed by ruses involving having children order knives, and filling in a bunch of potholes. If that all sounds on the fringes of daftness, then that’s about the right assessment of the tone.
But The Great Amazon Heist is underscored by a more serious political thesis. Butler begins the show by going undercover in an Amazon warehouse in Coventry. There he finds “workers in pain and potentially unsafe practices”, not to mention a hiring spree that critics perceived as union-busting (something Amazon denies). For many of the UK’s manual labourers, the sight of workers being asked to stand for hours on end, or load trucks without significant ventilation, might not be particularly revelatory, but the practical prohibition on delivery drivers taking bathroom breaks certainly is. “Just for the record, it was urine,” says Butler after finding a bottle full of not-apple-juice by the side of the road, “I know because I sniffed it.”
And so, The Great Amazon Heist sets out to beat Amazon at its own game – and it’s here that things start to disintegrate. The film – just 50 minutes long – moves at a pace associated with YouTubers like Max Fosh or duo Josh Pieters and Archie Manners: quippy, meta, relentless. What exactly the “heist” is, remains vague. Indeed, halfway through the show, it was still unclear exactly how the primary McGuffin – the wee-based energy drink – worked. And the rapid pivot to a second prank where Butler’s nieces use Alexa to order knives (“Alexa, add stainless steel carpenter knife to my basket,” commands six-year-old Eve), and then a third prank, where Butler fills in potholes and then requests refunds for the pothole filler, create a tangled trilogy. In the end, it is closer to three 15-minute YouTube pranks, stapled together here by a frame narration involving a lawyer wearily informing Butler that, yes, “you’ve potentially endangered people’s lives”.
But this structural messiness shouldn’t detract from the fact that The Great Amazon Heist is an enjoyable watch, nor that Amazon (which Butler pronounces with an idiosyncratic stress on the last syllable) is a ripe target. And beyond the satisfaction of the juvenile japes, Channel 4 brings in a parade of left-wing experts, from Jacobin writer Alex Press to Labour MP Nadia Whittome (whose name was misspelt in the version I saw). The effect is reminiscent of the high-profile campaigning of Joe Lycett, whose targets include Qatar ambassador David Beckham and litigious fashion firm Hugo Boss. The show’s combination of social urgency, infectious enthusiasm, and a slightly homemade character (the sound quality, during some of the interviews, is slightly below what’s normal for broadcast TV) give The Great Amazon Heist a sense of authenticity. It is like Butler is back in his Michelin-starred shed.
If you were raised on “is your refrigerator running?” prank calls or even the visceral larks of Jackass, then The Great Amazon Heist is a good initiation to this new frontier of zany social media hijinks. After all, this isn’t Newsnight. It doesn’t pick a target and home in on it with Kirsty Wark’s laser focus. But as an introductory 101 course to some big ideas, the greatest trick The Great Amazon Heist plays is smuggling its viewers into the thorny world of industrial politics.
