Batchelor In stitches at Willy wonky

IF you asked me to describe last week in two words, I would say “absolutely hilarious”.

That was because I was totally invested in the chaotic Willy Wonka Experience which took the internet by storm.

It came at the right time for me because I wasn’t in the best place mentally and had recently had a family bereavement.

So when pictures and videos started showing up about a chaotic event which happened just over an hour down the road from me, I couldn’t stop laughing. For days.

As time went on, it got even funnier, and then I found out that the Willy’s Chocolate Experience was made visually famous thanks to people from Dundee.

The viral photo of the sad looking Oompa Loompa was taken by Louise Dalson, and the majority of the set prop photos, including the rainbow arch, were taken by Stuart Sinclair, both from Dundee.

What I never expected to see next was that both commented on Dundee culture about it with the pictures they took. Louise commented on a meme that I shared which jokingly referenced Dundonians creating famous pictures.

The event was hilarious in many ways, from what was promised, to the end result which involved the police being called and the international media sitting up and looking on in bemusement.

The AI-generated scripts and characters were a highlight, with a character called “The

Unknown” bringing joy to people watching the debacle taking place around them.

The event in Glasgow was compared to DashCon, an event inspired by the social media website Tumblr, held in 2014 in the US – as well as the infamous Fyre Festival which was a fraudulent music festival that oversold itself.

The fiasco was so big that it even spilled over to my work, with followers on Dundee Culture asking me if I could start a petition to have Willy’s Chocolate Experience brought to Dundee, and have it hosted at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

This was in response to another petition created to bring the event back which received over 2,000 signatures with £50 donated.

It was just so funny that something intended to be small almost broke the internet.

And it feels unbelievable that we were one of the first to report on the event which makes it even cooler!

If you told me two weeks ago that I would be writing a column on the subject of a chaotic knock-off wonky Willy Wonka that was made famous by Dundonians, I would have questioned whether you were serious.

It was the funniest week I have ever had on the internet.

Louise Dalson’s photograph.