Props from Willy Wonka fiasco raise thousands in charity auction after being found dumped in a bin

Props from the disastrous Willy Wonka event in Glasgow have raised thousands of pounds in a charity auction after they were found dumped in a bin.

The backdrops from the viral event – which was pulled after frustrated attendees called the police – ended up raising £2,250 for a Palestinian aid charity.

Monorail record store in Glasgow auctioned them on eBay after they were passed on by the finder, with its online manager saying they were bought by musician Ben Howard.

The record store’s online manager Michael Kasparis said: “We are all watching [the auction] like you’d watch the end of a football game.

“It was £900 and then jumped to £1,050, then one second before it closed it was £2,050 and it came through at £2,250. We’d thought if it goes into four figures we’d be very happy, so it was a pretty amazing result.”

He added: “I was slightly worried that the joke had gone, but it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon.”

The Wonka event fiasco went viral after images of the sparsely decorated warehouse staffed by actors dressed as Oompa Loompas and other characters spread worldwide.

Willy’s Chocolate Experience organiser Billy Coull apologised for his “vision of the artistic rendition of a well-known book that didn’t come to fruition” and offered 850 people their money back before closing the Glasgow experience on 24 February after furious parents demanded refunds.

One parent complained of arriving to find a “disorganised mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lacklustre candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears”.

A stand-up comedian hired to play Willy Wonka at the widely criticised chocolate factory experience spoke to The Independent about how the chaos unfolded.

Wonka-esque impersonator Paul Connell, 31, said: “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things. The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’ It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate or is the chocolate itself evil?

“They even misspelt my contract, but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’ [sic]. But I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”

But at the Friday evening dress rehearsal hours before opening, he turned up to find the “immersive and enchanting” Willy Wonka experience was, in fact, an empty warehouse with a few plastic mushrooms without a chocolate bar in sight.

“In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said. “I spoke to the people running it and thought, surely by the morning it won’t look like this, and then I turned up in the morning and it absolutely did.”

Mr Connell described how the event descended into people shouting, crying, and having arguments, with the set left “trashed”.

Speaking of the actors, he said: “It was actually getting quite dangerous for us. But it was heartbreaking, to be honest. There were kids in costume better than ours, crying.”

He added: “It’s a night I’ll try to forget.”

However, the money raised from the props can be seen as a silver lining. Mr Kasparis said the funds are being donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians to help provide medical services in Gaza.

Mr Kasparis said: “I personally was a little bit worried that the auction was a bit silly for the cause, but we thought if it raises money that’s the most important thing.

“It’s a charity we’ve all donated to and that we all care deeply about and it was kind of a no-brainer when we thought to auction it for charity.”