‘People came just to see how awful it was’: from Wonkaland to Fyre, the inside story of festivals so bad they went viral

‘I ended up giving out one jelly bean per person’: Kirsty Paterson, the sad Oompa-Loompa

In February this year, Kirsty Paterson was, she says, “a bit lost”. At 29, she had worked for an estate agent for five years and hated it. When she was diagnosed with ADHD, she realised a nine-to-five office job was never going to be a good fit. “It’s quite hard, because you try to do things like everyone else, and you think: ‘Why can I not be as organised?’ or ‘Why can I not just sit still?’ That’s the big thing for me.”

Paterson retrained as a yoga teacher and was building a clientele, doing bits and bobs on the side. She’s always loved performing. “I need creativity, I need stimulation, something different every day. Acting is my perfect job: I have no fear in front of crowds, it’s something I was born to do.” She had done musical theatre and dance, as well as kids’ entertainment and performing with fire.

So an ad on the employment site Indeed, looking for performers for a weekend, seemed ideal. She applied, and got a call on a Friday afternoon. “I was expecting an audition. I’d actually been practising stuff with my friends. But they were like: ‘You’ve got the job.’” They said she needed to be there to collect her script – in an hour. The job would begin the following day – at Willy’s Chocolate Experience . Yes, that one …

So Paterson went to the venue in the Whiteinch area of Glasgow and picked up the script, a baffling document that didn’t seem to have any connection to Roald Dahl or the Willy Wonka she knew. “It was gibberish, rubbish. I love the Willy Wonka films, but I was so confused. There was this character called the Unknown. I went home and watched the original film and was like, this doesn’t make any sense.” She needed the money, though, so the next morning Paterson went to work.

People were slagging me off, telling me I need a facelift, I’m ugly. It was going global. It was horrendous for my mental health

The organiser of Willy’s Chocolate Experience was a man called Billy Coull, who had been behind a series of questionable ventures, including AI-generated thriller novels. On Saturday morning, people started turning up at the venue, looking forward to the promised “stunning and intricately designed settings inspired by Roald Dahl’s timeless tale” and “an array of delectable treats scattered throughout the experience”, for which they’d paid up to £35 a ticket.

What they found was a near-empty warehouse – no chocolate, just a few props, candy canes, a rudimentary rainbow, a couple of giant toadstools – and a group of performers with an impossible task, including Kirsty Paterson, dressed as an Oompa-Loompa (kinda). “We felt really awful because the kids were clearly excited. So me and the other actors said: ‘We’ve just got to make the best of a bad situation.’”

They did one performance of the nonsense script, “then Billy came over and was like: ‘Abandon the script.’ So I was just dancing and handing out jelly beans to kids because there was nothing else, but then I was running out of jelly beans, 45 minutes in. I went to get more and they gave me the tiniest bag, so I ended up giving out one jelly bean to each person … ”

Despite the performers’ efforts, there was no saving Willy’s Chocolate Experience. It was crap, the complaints flooded in, followed by demands for refunds from angry parents. “I was angry: it was £35 a ticket. I don’t have kids, but some of my friends do – an event like that is a big financial strain,” says Paterson. Eventually, the police were called to investigate complaints, and after just a couple of hours Coull shut the event down.

But the social media storm was only just getting going. Pictures started to pop up: the empty warehouse; a table of plastic cups quarter-filled with lemonade; the masked character known as Unknown, who emerged from behind a mirror, terrifying children – who then ran to Paterson for their single jelly bean. A picture of Paterson went viral. She was standing at her jelly bean station (a table with a few things from a cheap chemistry set strewn about, presumably to imply she had magicked her jelly beans up), but it looked more Walter White than Willy Wonka. Paterson became a meme: sad Oompa-Loompa in meth lab at Wonkaland.

“The picture showed the moment when I had had enough. I was like: ‘What is my life like, what am I doing with myself?’” She got bombarded by abuse online. “People were slagging me off, telling me I need a facelift, that I’m ugly. They thought I was part of the organisation. It was going global. It was absolutely horrendous for my mental health,” she says, choking up talking about it.

Coull apologised and offered refunds to 850 people. Paterson doesn’t want to talk about him. She says she got £200 of the £500 she should have been paid for two days’ work. She turned her phone off and went off social media for the sake of her mental health. “I couldn’t even face going to Asda,” she says. It was her sister who told her she could turn it round. “I felt like this was out of my control, and she was like: ‘Make it in your control then.’”

And that’s what Paterson did. She did a TikTok post , saying basically: I’m the Oompa-Loompa girl, be kind, it’s affecting me. And that went viral too. She was invited on to ITV’s Good Morning Britain, and more. Now she has an agent to help with social media and filter through the many opportunities she’s been offered. She’s launching her own merch. A few days after speaking with me, she was due to fly to Los Angeles to take part in Willy’s Chocolate Experience LA, a knowing pop-up recreation of the Glasgow event organised by a collection of local artists. And this summer, Paterson is in a musical at the Edinburgh festival fringe parodying the event, alongside cast members from the original Wonka film.

In the end, she says, it has been amazing. “The opportunities I’ve got from this are just not what happens to people like me. It’s been a storm, it’s been a ride, it’s been a wave … extremely hard at points, but this has given me a chance to be the person I want to be.”

Her dream was always to perform, to do something on TV. Also to do work connected to neurodivergent issues, and she’s been doing that too, talking to ADHD charities. Paterson hated that picture of her that went viral, but maybe because it was partly true. “There were aspects of my life where I was as sad as the sad Oompa-Loompa,” she admits. “The transition from that to, you know, these opportunities, it has been an amazing thing for me.”

‘Father Christmas and one of the elves were having a romp’: Emma Craven, the ‘slapped elf’

On paper, it sounded great: Lapland New Forest, a family Christmas event, with promised “Hollywood special effects”, a “magical tunnel of light”; a place “where dreams really do come true”. You’d expect so, with tickets at £30 each or four for £100.

In 2008, Emma Craven, 32 at the time, saw the ad in the Bournemouth Echo: an events agency was looking for extroverted people. “So I had an interview and they were like: ‘Yeah, you’re really out-there and cheery, ideal to be an elf at Lapland,”’ she tells me, talking from Bournemouth, where she lives and works.

At the workers’ induction day, on site shortly before the gates opened, there were signs that perhaps it wasn’t going to be so magical. “There was mud, lots and lots of mud … Oh God, reliving this is horrendous!”

Craven tells me about the “log cabins” – more like B&Q sheds, empty, with not a stitch of decoration. What about the magical tunnel of light? “Do you mean the string of LED lights along the path?” she says.

“This guy Vic, one of the organisers, turned up and explained it wasn’t quite finished, but that we should close our eyes and imagine it’s going to look amazing, like something from the north pole.” There was supposed to be a snow machine, but it never turned up and they ended up spraying a few cans of fake snow about the place before it just disappeared in the mud.

They gave me face paints from the pound shop. I don’t do face painting. I was literally painting kids’ noses red like: there you go, Rudolph

Then there were the animals. A dog lover, Craven was really upset by the sorry bunch of chained-up huskies. “They were all howling, and it wasn’t out-in-the-wilderness talking-to-each-other howling; it was painful to listen to.” As for the reindeer: “Some had lost antlers or their antlers hadn’t grown. You know those kiddies’ headband reindeer antlers? They were trying to put them on the reindeer, I’m not even kidding …” Now Craven is howling, hysterically.

Still, a job’s a job, and on the day of the opening Craven pulled on her ill-fitting elf costume, “with elastic bands round the trouser ankles so I didn’t trip up in the mud”.

The queues to get in were horrific; parking took hours, and people were already angry when they got in and saw what Lapland New Forest had to offer.

“We were told to entertain the crowds – smile, wave, dance around with the kids. But I think a lot of the staff had already decided it wasn’t going to work, so the face-painters didn’t show up, and I was told I had to do that. I said: ‘I don’t do face-painting.’ They said: ‘It’s not hard, here you go, have these face paints we’ve bought from the pound shop.’ I was literally painting kids’ noses red, like: there you go, you’re Rudolph.”

Day two, and about half the staff had bolted; the ones still there had pretty much given up. But – having forked out £30 a ticket – most families were still showing up. Every child was supposed to get a present from Santa. But the queue for the Santa shed got ridiculously long and people were understandably cross. “So they decided to speed it up by turning a couple of the elves – not me – into additional Father Christmases. So you’ve got about four Father Christmases in different huts, and we had to direct people to this hut or that hut. Then you had the parents complaining that they could see one of the Father Christmases behind the hut having a fag. They were wandering around with fags, hip flasks … I didn’t see it, but I was informed that one Father Christmas and one of the elves were having a romp in one of the huts.”

That may have been the final straw for one queueing family. “It was late, the temperature had dropped, it was dark, we were being shouted at by pretty much everyone there, and this woman came haring at me, shouting: ‘Look what you’ve done to my kids,’ ramming the buggy into my legs. And her fella’s shouting in my face: ‘You’re all a bunch of effing scam artists, you know what you’re effing well up to,’ and I was like: ‘It’s nothing to do with us, we’ve been employed by an agency.’ I was called an effing slag, in front of their kids. And then she came right at me, and whack, she slapped me right across the side of my face.”

Related: Charlie Brooker on the closure of the Lapland New Forest Christmas theme park

Craven understands the parents’ frustration. “People had literally been done out of their money – it was a scam, there was no way it was ever going to work.” News (which spread slower in 2008) of the New Forest Lapland fiasco was out. “I remember the helicopters flying above to get pictures of what it was really like.”

The slap was the end of it for Craven. The agency pulled the elves out, and she got two weeks’ pay. Was she scarred by the experience? “Being slapped in the face takes you aback a bit, but I wouldn’t say scarred. It’s just one of those things that goes down in the memories.”

New Forest Lapland was closed down soon after. The organisers, Victor and Henry Mears, were found guilty on eight charges of misleading advertising. The judge said they showed not one “scintilla of remorse” and they were sentenced to 13 months (but only served half that time after their convictions were quashed due to a juror texting during the trial).

That was the end of Emma Craven’s entertainment career. After that, she got her HGV licence, and she now works as a driver for a gas company, delivering dangerous goods. No, she’s never been slapped in this job. “People wouldn’t wish to slap me now, it’s probably more than their life’s worth; it’s best not to upset me.”

When Craven saw the Glasgow Willy Wonka story, it struck a chord. “I said to my husband: ‘I bet you any money you like that Lapland will come up in the news again.’”

‘Crinkley Bottom Great House was just an aluminium shed’: Steve Middlesbrough, Blobbyland’s in-house DJ

Nearly three decades before everything went wrong in Wonkaland, on 30 July 1994, Noel Edmonds’ World of Crinkley Bottom opened its gates for the first time.

Then, up to 15 million people tuned into Noel’s House Party, BBC One’s Saturday night celebration of inanity, featuring a shapeless humanoid irritant prankster named Mr Blobby. A “pink, spotty, rubber twat”, Bob Mortimer called him, but Blobby did encapsulate something of the decade. Blobby and Noel were massive: they’d switched on the Morecambe illuminations the previous summer, attracting a record crowd. Lancaster city council decided the way for Morecambe to emerge from the shadow of Blackpool, its more illustrious and illuminated neighbour, was to build a Mr Blobby theme park. So they did, in Happy Mount Park. It didn’t end happily.

Steve Middlesbrough, now 68, is a DJ, and has been running events in Morecambe for half a century. As well as being serious about his music, he was also a fan of Blobby. “I loved anarchy,” he says, speaking from Morecambe. He was there at Blobbyland, as it became known, on that first day, though he wasn’t working there yet. “There wasn’t a problem with people coming, the queue was right round the park, it must have been a mile long.”

The problem came once the paying customers went through the gates. “The first family went in, and after seven minutes they came out and said: ‘Where is it?’ And I just thought: ‘Oh … my … God.’ I gulped because I knew the scale of the problem.”

To land a celebrity like Noel Edmonds, and Mr Blobby … done right it could have been … Mickey Mouse in Florida

What would that family, who had paid £15, and the others in the mile-long queue, have seen once inside? “Everything they could’ve seen for free, but painted pink and yellow,” Middlesbrough says.

To be fair, Noel Edmonds’ World of Crinkley Bottom did have a row of little houses. “They got local builders … ” Middlesbrough begins, before collapsing into hysterics. “I’m laughing thinking about it. They got local builders to build a row of six little houses, and Blobby was to be in one of them.” And he’s off again, laughing like a hyena.

Inside the park, there was an aerobics instructor, “and his job was to knock on Blobby’s door on the hour and say: ‘Blobby, Blobby, are you coming to do your aerobics?’ And Blobby would go: ‘Blobby Blobby Blobby.’” That’s all Bobby said, remember? “And out he’d come and do his aerobics. It was scripted to the max, so boring. The kids were joining in with the script: if they were there for the day they probably saw it six or seven times.”

The complaints poured in, as did demands for refunds. And it went about as viral as it could go in the days before things did go viral. The local media, press and TV all slated it. “People came to see how bad it was,” Middlesbrough says. Blackpool looked on smugly.

Middlesbrough was brought into Blobbyland as a troubleshooter. After a few weeks of declining numbers and increasing mockery, the council asked him for advice. “I said: ‘Right, for this Saturday night I want a stage building there, because it’s got to be more entertaining. I will DJ, I’ll build up the excitement, we’ll have a magician, we’ll have dancers, a gunge tank, we’ll have lots of exciting things going on instead of the kids bored to tears after five minutes and their parents mad because it’s cost them 15 quid. I’m taking Blobby out of that house. He’s the star, we’ve got to build a show around Blobby.’ They said: ‘I don’t think the BBC will let you do that.’ I said: ‘I don’t intend asking them!’”

Also in Middlesbrough’s sights was the Crinkley Bottom “Great House”, which was neither great nor a house, but an aluminium shed. “You’ve come from Manchester or Liverpool or Barrow and you see this aluminium hut which may or may not have had a sign saying Great House … it was shockingly bad. The only good thing about that aluminium shed was if you banged it, it made a really good echoing noise.” So he got kids up doing that. And at least for one Saturday night Blobbyland was banging.

That still didn’t save it. At the end-of-season staff party (“the young team were fantastic, they worked their socks off”) the local MP dropped in to tell everyone they’d done really well in difficult circumstances and that next year they’d really show them. “That cheered everyone up. Next day they closed it down.”

Middlesbrough says the council’s intentions were good: they wanted to bring more visitors. “But you know, they’re not entrepreneurs, they’re not theme-park builders. And there are so many people involved.”

Personally, Middlesbrough is sad it didn’t work, and thinks it was an opportunity missed. “To land a celebrity like Noel, and Mr Blobby … done right it could have been … ” he pauses, before finding what he’s looking for across the Atlantic, “Mickey Mouse in Florida. Think about it, it’s only a mouse!”

Whether Noel Edmonds’ World of Crinkly Bottom, done better, could have rivalled Disney World we’ll never know; it lasted just a few months. But the aftershocks rumbled on. A bitter legal battle between Lancaster city council and Noel Edmonds’ company Unique ensued, with each side blaming the other for the fiasco. The court found in Edmonds’ favour, and Blobbygate, as it inevitably became known, ended up costing the council £2m. Edmonds, Middlesbrough says, called it the biggest local government scandal in history.

Middlesbrough says you can tell where Blobbyland was in Happy Mount Park. “You have to look carefully: it’s been painted over, but you can just about tell where Blobby’s footprints were.” Maybe it’s wishful thinking, because he then says: “ You couldn’t tell, I could.”

Morecambe has moved on, to bigger, better things. It is getting its own Eden Project eco-tourism attraction with £50m from the last government’s levelling up fund. “Absolutely brilliant,” says Middlesbrough. Yeah Blackpool, who’s laughing now?

‘The mattresses were all soaking wet. I was in tears’: JR Rolle, the Fyre festival fixer

In November 2016, JR Rolle was working for his cousin’s boat rental business in Black Point in the Bahamas. Rolle helped deliver jetskis up to Norman’s Cay, an island that had once been used by the Medellin cartel and had just been bought by an American businessman named Billy McFarland.

“I thought Billy was pretty cool,” says Rolle on a video call from another island, Aklins, where he now works as an engineer for the local power company. “I figured he was a baller. He would come to the Bahamas with all these models and rent all these jetskis and boats and just have a real good time.”

McFarland, with hip-hop mogul Ja Rule, shot the glamorous promo for the infamous Fyre festival on Norman’s Cay with a coterie of supermodels, including Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner. They were going to hold the festival there, but were kicked off by the actual owner (turns out McFarland hadn’t bought it after all) who wasn’t happy about them selling it as Pablo Escobar’s island. In any case, it didn’t have the infrastructure for a festival, so they had to find somewhere else.

By this time, Rolle was working for them. “I basically just did any little thing they asked. I was sourcing homes, places to stay, houses to rent and hotels. I would pick people up from the airport, take them around when they were looking for a site.”

One problem was that the festival was scheduled to run at the same time as a big regatta, and all the accommodation was booked up, but McFarland wouldn’t move the date. “You had to have a positive mindset on that team,” Rolle says. “Anyone who didn’t believe it was going to happen … you were fired, out the door.”

The organiser disappeared on me, stopped answering my calls. And I had a lot of people owed money – 30 or 40 people, looking for me

Rolle did believe, though, for now. They found a place: a building site on Rokers Point on Great Exuma, which didn’t look anything like the paradise in the promo video. Rolle’s job was to go about recruiting local people to try to get it ready. McFarland would give Rolle the money to pay them, and they had a matter of days to get the site ready for the 5,000 people who had paid from $500 for a standard ticket to $12,000 for a VIP package.

The night before they were due to arrive, there was a massive rainstorm. “I was running around trying to close tent doors,” Rolle remembers. (These were hurricane relief tents they’d somehow got hold of, maybe not what you expect if you’ve paid $12,000 for a VIP package). “The mattresses were all soaking wet. I was basically in tears, like there was no way this was going to work.”

Fyre went up in smoke. Or drowned in mud. Instead of the promised luxury tropical paradise, the planeloads of rich kids arriving from the US found a hellscape. The site resembled a refugee camp after a hurricane: everything was sodden, luggage went missing, there was rubbish everywhere, not enough to eat, the bands had cancelled, no one knew what to do; it was chaos.

The global response on social media was gleeful. But for Rolle it wasn’t so funny. “That’s when it became a nightmare for me.” The trouble was he was due to pay the local workers he’d recruited, but McFarland, who should have given Rolle the money, was nowhere to be found. “He just disappeared on me, stopped answering my calls. And I had a lot of people owed money – 30 or 40 people, looking for me. I was like: ‘What did I get myself into?’”

Rolle, worried for his own safety, did what McFarland had done: he disappeared, took a boat off the island.

McFarland was arrested in the US for fraud in relation to Fyre. He was sentenced to six years in prison, of which he served three and a half. Rolle doesn’t bear any grudges. “Yeah I was owed money, but after I got out of there I spoke with him. He was able to send me my money and he was like: we’ll get to pay the workers, don’t worry about it. I talk to him from time to time. Me and him are still cool.”

He thinks some of the workers didn’t get paid, but only for the final three or four days, and they’d mostly been paid well until then. Rolle says he feels for the ones who came in at the end, but he can and does go back to Great Exuma safely. Overall, he thinks it was good for the island. “They spent like half a million dollars or more in a couple of weeks, it was great for the economy.”

Fyre – and the two subsequent TV documentaries about it – helped put Exuma on the map. “Like I always say, any publicity is good publicity,” says Rolle. “A lot of people who didn’t know of Great Exuma checked out the place on Google and said: ‘This is awesome, I need to go there.’ It brought a lot of tourists to the island.”

Rolle still maintains that McFarland wanted to put on a great festival, he just didn’t know how to do it. And though Fyre is famous for being a massive disaster, for Rolle personally it really wasn’t bad. The opposite, in fact, especially after the Netflix documentary , which he features in, came out. “It got me jobs, I made new friends. Overall it was a good thing.”

It made good memories for him, too – not the sodden tents and fleeing the island, but the promotional video on Norman’s Cay. “You know, being out on the beaches with the models, on the jetskis and the boats, having a great time – that was the real experience they were trying to capture. That was one of the best times in my life.”
Additional reporting: Kitty Drake.