Daily Mail

In hiding, oddball who charged £35 for a Willy Wonka wonderland so woeful they joked about it on U.S. TV!

- By Kathryn Knight

WThere was only one jelly bean allowed per child

HEn Matt Waterfield had an enquiry about hiring his event space for a ‘ fully immersive family experience’ he was impressed by plans for what seemed to be a wonderfull­y innovative new attraction.

The enquiry, which came from the impressive­ly named House of Illuminati, centred on a Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory Experience — themed around the beloved Roald Dahl novel and recent film franchises — hosted in Glasgow’s 23,000 square foot Boxhub venue.

‘On paper, it sounded great,’ 25year- old Boxhub director Waterfield reflects. But as the Mail reported earlier this week, all those who arrived at the event last Saturday, having forked out £35 for tickets, were confronted by a largely empty warehouse ‘decorated’ with a few randomly scattered props, hanging plastic background­s, and a candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child.

The much anticipate­d chocolate fountain didn’t materialis­e at all.

Complete with bewildered-looking young actors, ‘Willy’s Chocolate Experience’ proved such a sorry spectacle it quickly went viral, covered by news channels as far afield as the U.S., where comedian Jimmy Kimmel featured it on his popular late-night talk show.

Little wonder organiser Billy Coull was forced to cancel the event three hours after the doors opened, apologisin­g that his ‘vision of the artistic rendition of a wellknown book didn’t come to fruition’. He insisted he would refund the 850 customers.

no one who has set eyes on the forlorn photos uploaded to social media by unhappy parents would dispute the event was a disaster. So what on earth went wrong?

While some — including Matt Waterfield — suggest it came down to naivety on Coull’s part, plenty of others are less charitable.

‘The whole thing has just been awful,’ Kirsty Paterson, one of the actors hired to be an Oompa Loompa, told the Mail. ‘I’m laughing about it now, but I was so angry for the kids and the parents.’

This week, a Facebook page called ‘House of Illuminati Scam’ had garnered nearly 3,000 members, with many saying they thought Coull was nothing less than what one called a ‘bad apple’.

Certainly, it appears that it is not the first time that the 35-year-old Glaswegian and father of three has found himself at the centre of controvers­y.

While he has latterly taken pains to delete his social media accounts, removing both his LinkedIn profile and a YouTube channel where he presented himself as a life coach and business guru, his X page, remains live, where he is described as a ‘doctor of metaphysic­al science and ordained reverend of the universal church of life’.

a Billy Coull also has an author page on amazon which links to 16 books — one of which, Operation Inoculatio­n, promises a ‘conspirato­rial journey into vaccinatio­n truth’ related to the ‘Deep State’.

Could this be the same Billy Coull who promised an immersive chocolate experience?

One Glaswegian parent certainly thinks it sounds like him, posting on Facebook that she once lived next door to Coull and found him a ‘ delusional’ Walter Mitty character claiming to be in turn a banker, a medic and a lawyer.

‘I once added up all the years’ experience and surmised that either he is 87 years old, or shock horror . . . he was lying,’ she wrote.

Certainly, Coull seems to have dabbled in a number of different schemes over the years.

In 2015, he was advertisin­g for people to join what he called the ‘worldwide e- commerce revolution’, saying he was looking for people to join his team of ‘homebased business marketers’. It was not, he emphasised, some ‘get rich quick scheme’ nor a ‘scam’.

What happened to this business is unclear — the site he posted is now no longer active — but as of early 2021, Coull was co-directing a Glasgow foodbank called Gowanbank Hub that he claimed fed thousands of families a month.

By December the same year, however, Gowanbank was mired in drama when a planned £95-a-head Santa’s Grotto event was cancelled at the last minute amid what Coull said were rising Covid cases. He said donated gifts would be distribute­d to those in need. nonetheles­s, suspicion lingered that the whole episode was not entirely above board. Either way, the Gowanbank Hub is now firmly shut and phone disconnect­ed.

Which brings us to the House of Illuminati, Coull’s event company which was registered with Companies House in november last year, along with two others called Billy De Savage and nexuma Holdings.

The former lists its activities as ‘book publishing’ and ‘activities of extraterri­torial organisati­ons and bodies’, the latter as ‘advertisin­g’, while the House of Illuminati has a website packed with aI-generated art advertisin­g ‘ unparallel­ed immersive experience­s’.

With Boxhub — a converted warehouse — only having been open for ten months, Waterfield found Coull’s enquiry at the start of this year appealing.

‘We’ve done some great events here but obviously we’re working on building our profile and this was new territory,’ he says.

Indeed, at first, all seemed to be proceeding well: ‘ There were detailed plans with props and lighting — a lot of stuff was dropped off the week before, and I knew they were hiring actors.’

among them was Kirsty Paterson, a 29-year- old yoga teacher and performer whose glum, orange-painted face is one of the images that went viral. She reveals she answered an ad offering £500 for two days of acting work, but arrived at the warehouse for rehearsals last Friday shocked at how underprepa­red the whole event seemed to be.

‘It wasn’t a finished production, just the start,’ she recalls. ‘They kept going on about how you could just improvise.’

She left having been reassured that the production team would be ‘working through the night’.

and Matt Waterfield, who’d turned up after 11pm on Friday night — less than 12 hours before doors were opening, found a venue he assumed was still a work in progress, only to be told by Coull it was finished. ‘He seemed perfectly pleased with it all,’ he recalls.

It was all far from the fantastica­l vision of Coull’s promotiona­l materials but, having signed a contract, the actors felt they had little option but to perform, or — to use Kirsty’s choice phrase — ‘ put sprinkles on s***’. Michael archibald, an 18-year-old aspiring actor, was called at 8pm the night before the ‘rehearsal’ and asked to play Wonka himself.

‘I arrived and met Billy who said he had been thinking about the experience for a long time and had been working on his scripts for two months, but it didn’t look like it,’ he told the Mail.

‘The script was clearly generated by aI as it made no sense at all.’

Few could argue with that sentiment, when confronted with a sample line: ‘ There is a man. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’

nonetheles­s, Michael duly turned up for work on the opening day at 8.30am.

He felt sorry for the female staff, who had been dressed in what he describes as ‘ party shop sexy Oompa Loompa’ costumes.

We now know what happened next: three hours of increasing­ly irate parents and sobbing children. Many parents say they have not yet received their money back. nor have the actors had their promised £500 payments either.

For Waterfield, meanwhile, it’s his business’s reputation which is at stake: ‘It’s been a tragic business, and unfortunat­ely our venue has become associated with that.’

and what of Billy Coull? ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of him, but I suspect he’s gone into hiding,’ Waterfield confides. The Mail was also unable to contact Coull despite repeated attempts.

But all may yet not be lost — together with a dedicated band of parents and some of the actors, Waterfield plans to try to organise a free replacemen­t show with the help of sponsors.

It’s a lovely sentiment, and whatever they do, at least one thing can be pretty much guaranteed: nothing can be quite as bad as what went before.

‘ The script was generated by AI, it made no sense’

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 ?? ?? Shambolic: The sparselyde­corated event created by Billy Coull, above. Forlorn Kirsty Paterson, below, played an Oompa Loompa
Shambolic: The sparselyde­corated event created by Billy Coull, above. Forlorn Kirsty Paterson, below, played an Oompa Loompa

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