It’s easy to forget how much we all needed the Fyre Festival when it happened. Back in 2017, the world was a mess. America was still coming to terms with the fact that it had elected Donald Trump; Brexit had thrown Europe into disarray. It was a tough time, and we all needed something to unite us. In hindsight, that thing turned out to be an island crammed with miserable influencers and hangers-on, who had paid up to $12,780 to gnaw on grim cheese sandwiches while sitting on wet mattresses inside hastily assembled disaster-relief tents. Remember how good we felt when we all learned about the Fyre Festival? Remember how the Schadenfreude kept us going?
Well, it’s another tough time. Brexit hasn’t been fixed. Trump’s shadow looms over Washington. We had an entire pandemic to endure. Everything seems far more broken than it did seven years ago. What I’m trying to say is this: God, we needed Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
For the uninitiated, Willy’s Chocolate Experience was an immersive event set up last month in Glasgow, Scotland. The event’s Web site promised the world—enchanted gardens, vibrant blooms, mind-expanding projections, and a paradise of sweet treats (illustrated with giddy, colorful images packed to bursting point with rainbows and staircases and lollipops). It looked like Roald Dahl’s imagination come to life. It was the perfect escape from the harsh Scottish winter, and well worth the $44 entry fee.
Except that isn’t exactly what greeted the reported hundreds of Willy’s Chocolate Experience ticket holders. Instead, they arrived to a sparsely decorated, concrete-floored warehouse with a scattering of drab plastic props, a flat-screen TV, a small bouncy castle, and distressed-looking Oompa-Loompas whose job was to hand each visitor a couple of jelly beans and a quarter of a cup of lemonade. It might also be important to note that there was no chocolate anywhere in the venue. Attendees who didn’t immediately storm out were then terrified by the mysterious masked figure called “the Unknown,” who crawled out from behind a mirror, upsetting children to the point of tears.
The total failure of Willy’s Chocolate Experience immediately went viral. Performers were quick to defend themselves on TikTok. Videos emerged of the event, soundtracked by a din of angry shouting and crying children. After one intake of visitors, there were complaints. After two, there was an uproar.
According to one performer, the scripted tour went so badly in its first run that the organizers instructed the actors to abandon any sense of story and just let the public wander freely around the displays, something they claimed took “about two minutes.” A dystopian cardboard sign with the words EVENT CANCELLED BY HOUSE OF ILLUMINATI. SORRY, scrawled in thick black paint, was salvaged by the venue. The only silver lining so far: some tatty, creased backdrops recovered from the garbage after the event were auctioned, and they raised $2,500 for a Palestinian-aid charity in the process.
It might also be important to note that there was no chocolate anywhere in the venue.
The whole thing became such a car crash that a Change.org petition was drawn up, demanding that the event return in its full disappointing state, so that more of us could endure the full-body shock of being scammed by an unofficial Charlie and the Chocolate Factory experience. Incredibly, a musical based on the event—provisionally titled “Willy Fest: A Parody Musical”—is already targeting a late-2024 opening.
Yes, scams like these are a dime a dozen—throw a dart at Christmas and you’ll basically hit a shoddily assembled wonderland grotto—but what made Willy’s Chocolate Experience so incredible was the same thing that made the Fyre Festival so incredible. There was a basic layer of humanity missing, which gave it bleakness. In the case of the Fyre Festival, it was the fact that only a bunch of grasping social-media influencers and people with enough money to imitate them were affected. Here, though, the feeling came from most of it being conjured up by A.I.
The Willy’s Chocolate Experience Web site, which was inexplicably still online until Wednesday, was full of otherworldly machine-created images. Some garbled text under one of them promised “catgacating, live performances, cartchy tuns, exaserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet treats,” which slipped by without correction. Then there was the reportedly A.I.-generated script that was handed to the performers a day before the event, describing all sorts of Hollywood-level effects (butterflies, talking flowers, rivers of lemonade, a giant vacuum that—spoiler alert—sucks up the Unknown) that could never be fully realized.
So enraptured are the British public that an hourlong documentary, Willy Wonka: The Scandal That Rocked Britain, is set to air tonight. The documentary promises interviews with members of the public, who, according to previews, will “share their stories of anger, disappointment, and disbelief,” and some of the staff who went viral. Hopefully the latter will include the performer behind the Unknown, who has just been offered a job by the London Dungeon.
The man behind the entire fiasco, Billy Coull, has been keeping a low profile since the event. As head of the House of Illuminati, Coull, it turns out, has a long relationship with A.I. According to Amazon, Coull has written a whopping 17 books, astonishingly all published in the summer of 2023.
There’s Shadows of Deception: Unveiling the Deep State Conspiracy, a 47-page book about “a secret network of puppeteers working behind the scenes, pulling the strings of political events and shaping the course of nations.” There’s Shadows of Power: Unveiling the Secrets of a Global Conspiracy, a 79-page novel about “a web of power and deception that stretches across governments and corporations.” And then there’s Operation Inoculation: Unveiling the A Conspiratorial Journey into Vaccination Truths Deep State Conspiracy. “Prepare to be captivated, challenged, and provoked,” reads the book’s description. It is 70 pages long and has all the bearings of something barfed out by ChatGPT.
But that isn’t the end of Coull’s talents. According to The Sunday Times of London, which tracked him down as part of an article that doubled as a profile of a broken man, he positioned himself to run for public office, but gave up that effort, in part because he’d failed to spell the name of his town correctly in a manifesto he wrote before local elections.
His now defunct personal Web site claimed that he had a series of advanced degrees, which include two doctorates. One of his X accounts states he is a “doctor of metaphysical science and ordained reverend of the universal church of life.” It’s worth pointing out that his qualifications come from an online and unaccredited religious institution. One former neighbor of Coull’s took to social media to share his impression of the man: “I once added up all the years of experience and surmised that he is 87 years old or—shock horror—he was lying.”
The failure of Willy’s Chocolate Experience seems to have hit Coull hard. On Facebook, he wrote an apology and promised to refund all tickets. Plus, according to The Sunday Times, he has moved out of his family home, and the wedding he had planned for this summer has been canceled. (In his Facebook post, Coull not only announced that the wedding was off but that no ticket sales had gone toward a wedding.) Perhaps this should be a cautionary tale for anyone considering A.I. for terrible get-rich-quick schemes. Sometimes, a world of imagination is best left imagined.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)