This is a real documentary. I point this out because it sounds like a spoof TV listing. If you’ve glanced at the internet recently, and I mean recently, you will have seen the TikToks and Reels and memes documenting a world of less-than pure imagination (or “imagnation”, as one of the posters for the event had it), for which punters in Glasgow paid £35 a ticket. They were promised a “Willy’s chocolate factory”, but what transpired was internet infamy. They found sad Oompa Loompa-type figures, in a too-big, melancholy, cavernous old factory space, hung with limp decorations and a cardboard chocolate river, adrift in all that vastness, and the whole thing became notorious in an instant. “I am the viral Oompa Loompa,” began one of the viral videos, with hilarious solemnity.
When it happened, five minutes ago, it struck that rare collective chord, uniting internet users for the briefest moment. It was an instant classic, so bad it was funny. Of course, the British have loved a dodgy Winter Wonderland story for years, but fake Wonka’s shame became the world’s joy. US chatshow hosts and news anchors were talking about it. Karen Gillan asked to be cast in an adaptation of it. (She should be careful what she wishes for – there is already a planned stage musical in the works.) Keir Starmer even worked it into PMQs. That should have been the death knell, but Channel 5 has decided it is up for milking it even further, and has turned the whole thing into an hour-long documentary. Unsurprisingly, it has the strong whiff of someone vastly overexplaining the joke. Next up, a 12-episode Ken Burns series on the Distracted Boyfriend meme?
Wonka: The Scandal that Rocked Britain treats this all with such seriousness that it is almost admirable, from the title – were you rocked? I was rocked – to the dramatic music accompanying every drone shot of Glasgow, making it look as if they’re on the hunt for an escaped supervillain, to the sit-down interviews which make it seem as if everyone is on the verge of confessing to gruesome crimes. Stretching this out to one hour is a more magical feat than even the original Willy Wonka could manage. Multiple parents tell us that they bought their children tickets. That’s a good few minutes filled. A tech journalist turns up to let us know that the promotional posters are “clearly computer-generated images”. I mean, have you looked at them? I don’t think anyone imagined that these psychedelic fever dreams were hard photographic evidence. A showbiz reporter says that the now-viral actors who appeared on the day could make a lot of money. A consumer expert discusses whether or not people were conned and/or scammed. We hear from and about upset children and angry parents, although many of them do look half-amused by the whole fiasco.
We meet the poor schoolgirl who played the Unknown, a character who hid behind a mirror in a silver mask and made children cry, and the architecture student who signed up to be Willy, who describes the experience as a place “where dreams went to die”. They seem sweet and, like the viral Oompa Loompa, the actors clearly tried to do their best with the little they were given. Amazingly, the sole bit of confectionary in this chocolate factory was a single jelly bean, dropped into the hands of the baffled children. It didn’t quite soothe their disappointment. The only real scoop is an exclusive interview with organiser Billy Coull, the man behind House of Illuminati, the mysterious company that put on the event. He seems so wildly out of his depth that you wonder how it could ever have gone so far. “I feel that people are owed an explanation,” he says, gravely. He is not being paid to appear, we are told, but he doesn’t really say much of note anyway.
Without the Coull interview, the documentary simply rehashes what many of us have already seen. Parents who filmed their experience and put it online appear to talk about filming the experience and putting it online. There is an online joke, circulating in various meme forms, that Instagram Reels are where old people go to watch out-of-date TikTok videos, but what does that make a hastily churned-out television documentary about an experience that went viral on TikTok and which uses a lot of footage from TikTok? I don’t want to be too hyperbolic, but since this documentary doesn’t mind treating a shoddy chocolate factory experience like some terrible world-shattering disaster, you could argue that this is television writing its own obituary. You can only watch this and wonder why you’ve watched it at all, when you could have been online instead, seeing a young woman declare, in all seriousness, that she is, in fact, the viral Oompa Loompa.
Wonka: The Scandal That Rocked Britain aired on Channel 5.
