ONCE again, Glasgow as a warren of absolute chancers has bewitched the world. Everywhere, but especially US-based media, has enjoyed the spectacle of Willy’s Chocolate Experience.

This is a warehouse in Whiteinch full of vaguely Willy-Wonka-related objects and subjects (that is, tatty rainbows and bemused actors). The “immersive experience” was quickly closed down after families, paying up to £35 a ticket, erupted in mild revolt at its jaw-dropping tattiness.

The manically depressed Oompa Loompa girl, fiddling away at what looked like a table full of crystal-meth equipment. The manically enthusiastic Wonka actor scaring the absolute crap out of kids, as he revealed a black faceless spectre called The Unknown. The chocolate rivers that look like baked cat litter. We loved it all.

The greatest laugh is that Billy Coull, the businessman behind this cathedral of fail, is himself a kind of shilpit wizard of the imagination. Though he’s more Billy Wonky than Willy Wonka.

The title of his company – House of Illuminati – is a bad/good enough start. But the enterprises sheltering beneath it are a prize display of 2024 digital charlatanry (most of their content has now been taken down, but some screengrabs are still out there).

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Coull turns up on Facebook as B.C Christian, a “seven-figure entrepreneur” who can “help you reduce fear of change”. There’s also billycoull.uk on YouTube – our man in life-coach mode, promising “something profound, something powerful, something phenomenal”.

Turn to Amazon’s books site, and Sir Wonky presents us with 17 titles, many of them published, improbably, on the same day in July last year. They certainly cover the waterfront (from Quantum Paradox to The Enigma’s Resurgence, and taking in a few anti-vax and DaVinci-Code-like conspiracies on the way). Rolling Stone got them analysed by experts, and it’s very likely all the material is ChatGPT-generated.

Go to Billy’s own site (also deleted but retrievable), and you’ll see a list of academic degrees that couldn’t quack more than a mechanical duck stuck on “go”. Take his PhD in “Conscious Business Ethics & Relationship Dynamics” from the mysterious “UoS”.

The most sub-Wonka-esque of Coull’s productions are his wide range of “extraordinary events and immersive experiences” offered on the House of Illuminati site.

There’s no evidence that any of them have been commissioned (other than Willy’s Chocolate Experience). All of them are illustrated with AI-generated pictures of “techno-mythical shows”, “mystique galas”, and “secret soirees”.

Their illustrations are the same dayglo, overstuffed AI images that pulled in punters to the Glasgow warehouse, and were found desultorily hanging on the walls of the warehouse by confused children.

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All in all, Billy is the very definition of a modern mountebank, his illusions and subterfuges conducted by means of available computation. As one of his social media pursuers puts it: Willy Wanker, indeed.

Yet for all the LOLs – and there are very many of them – there are some profundities struggling to be heard in this story. Something about the relationship between technology, creativity, commerce and community. That a magic and enchanted world can have a direct relation to exploitation and expropriation is deeply baked into the original Wonka story.

Roald Dahl’s original novel came out at the height of 60s and 70s counterculture and its social struggles. It bears a bracingly vengeful attitude towards the middle and upper classes. Fat privileged boys are squeezed through pipes; greedy-guzzling and haughty girls have to be “dejuiced”. Their materialistic, status-obsessed parents are thoroughly dismantled.

Charlie triumphs because he finally hands back his golden ticket at the last moment, having been furiously enthusiastic about the whole tawdry process of getting it.

He is welcomed into “a world of pure imagination”, as the movie’s song has it. Dahl decides that it’s Charlie’s moral character which makes him capable of being the inheritor of Wonka’s playground of manufacture.

IT’S a nice thought. Coull is, by all accounts, refunding those who shelled out £35 for his peremptory “immersive experience” – meaning he hasn’t disappeared to the hills with his cash. So he passes the original Dahl/Wonka test.

But it’s the fact that Coull leant so heavily on these new creative and simulatory tools which clearly got him into trouble in the first place. It wasn’t just the promotional imagery that was AI-generated – many reports verify that the script was too.

It strikes me that we’re entering a new era of digital hucksters, who’ll readily construct and sell you plausible realities. And we’re only at the foothills of it.

The world is laughing at Coull because his capacity to realise the virtual imaginings of his Wonka vision fell so ridiculously short. Maybe the laughter is relief. Does his haplessness allow us to still see the gaps in reality?

There’s a scenario way on the other side of this. One where 3D manufacture automatically builds these luscious digital forms, exactly as they have been envisioned.

Coull may be the Edward D Wood of hyper-reality (named after the cult movie-maker who made the world’s worst film, Plan 9 From Outer Space). But to me, his abject failure only highlights the avidity of the demand from punters – which is to “immerse” themselves in possible worlds.

Indeed, is Coull providing us – no doubt inadvertently – with a Brechtian caution: Let’s not be too keen to “immerse” ourselves? As someone said on the socials: “Is this actually a Banksy project?”

The same people who crow over this digitally-enabled tawdriness would similarly ooh and ahh at the Sphere in Vegas (coming to a bling-city near you), or the Apple Vision Pro.

Of course, Apple and many others are laying big bets. They’re hoping that we actually want to re-enchant our daily experience; that we desire an imaginative layer draped over and around our realities.

In fact, if Mr Wanker is still in the events game 10 years from now, he could probably set up in a car park with a few ironing boards and some boxes filled with wet sponges …depending on whether he could project a VR world directly into his punters’ mirrorshades (or some other neuro-tech.) Again, I think this is why we’re loving Coull’s disastrous immersion. Because we deeply want to see the crumbly edges and backstage areas of the polished, digitalised worlds we increasingly live in.

Am I making some appeal to the good old pre-digital days?

A cosy realm, where everyone can’t become a potential movie-maker or event planner, just by typing their prompt into the text field of a generative AI? Why should the crooked timber (and crazed fantasizing) of humanity get its expression? Woe is us!

Haud on. One might actually wish for sourly alienated Oompa Loompas scowling at toddlers in a Whiteinch warehouse, if they had any chance of supplanting the originals.

Do any research into Dahl, Wonka’s creator, and you find a “frightful sod” of a man, given to rabid bursts of antisemitism in public places.

You also find the Oompa Loompas originally depicted (in the first edition of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory) as dark-skinned pygmies from Africa, slavishly serving and nutritionally dependent on the great Wonka.

Is it good that we come back, again and again, to the essentially aristocratic style of creativity that Wonka represents (reinforced by Timothee Chalamet’s performance in the recent prequel movie)?

And again, maybe we owe Wonky Billy a big favour. Hamfistedly, he’s making explicit the issue about who gets the right to cultural expression in the digital age.

If we now have such compelling, ubiquitous and attractive tools at our hands, who are we attracting, and why?

Meanwhile, someone’s already created a merchandise toy for The Unknown. Will this tomfoolery ever stop?

Please, if you don’t mind, not yet.