You would have thought, given the sheer velocity at which Glasgow’s dismal Willy Wonka experience travelled around the world, that people would have wised up. You would have thought that, upon seeing an expensive and unofficial “fan experience” pop up near your home, everyone would give it a wide berth. You would have thought that, as terrible as the Wonka fiasco was, the sole plus side would be the instant death of that entire industry.
And yet last Sunday, a venue in Michigan, US put on an evening called The Detroit Bridgerton Themed Ball, and charged ticket-holders between $150 and $1,000 (£115-£750) to attend. The people who went ended up sitting on the floor, eating KitKats and forlornly watching the evening’s entertainment, which consisted of a solitary pole dancer working the middle of the room. Truly, humanity is cursed by its innate failure to learn from its past mistakes.
In fairness, The Detroit Bridgerton Themed Ball promised a lot. According to the event’s still-active website, the organisers, Uncle N Me LLC, promised a “Bridgerton themed ball with prizes, giveaways and more. You’ll also get the chance to win the ‘Diamond of the Season’. Suitors in attendance will have a chance to win $2,000 cash for best dressed.” Some ticket-holders at the higher end of the price range claim that the event also promised dinner, a play and classical music.
Sure, perhaps you could argue that there were already signs of a lack of attention to detail – the description ends “Your [sic] welcome to sell your ticket as well if you cannot be in attendance” – but even that couldn’t possibly have alerted attenders to the horrors that lurked within.
According to various reports on social media, whatever food was available ran out after an hour, wasn’t cooked properly and was served by staff in sports jerseys. There was no cash prize, no play, no alcohol, nor enough chairs for people to sit on. The scenery, in true unofficial fan experience tradition, appeared to be flat Poundland-level backdrops.
According to one video on TikTok, there was a “queen” in attendance for visitors to have their photo taken with, but she spent her encounters handing out business cards and telling people to follow her on social media. For an extra $40 (£30), guests could sit on a vaguely throne-like seat and have their photo taken by a photographer who insisted on airdropping their shots to them. The whole thing, by all accounts, looks like an absolute disaster.
Unlike the Wonka experience, however, there doesn’t appear to be any egregious use of AI here. No weirdly mutated promotional material, no nonsensical ChatGPT-generated scripts for staff to try to follow. No, the Detroit Bridgerton Ball simply appears to have failed thanks to good old-fashioned human error. It was overpriced and cheaply produced. It was badly organised and terribly executed. While the organisers might have got away with that a decade ago, we now live in an age where everyone with a phone is able to take photographic evidence of just how bad the event is and share it with the world in an instant.
And make no mistake, the internet loves this. Show people the yawning chasm between an amazing promise and the dismal reality, and that’s the news cycle sewn up for a fortnight. It boggles the mind that the Detroit Bridgerton Ball organisers didn’t think of this at all, resulting in them having to issue an apology statement saying that: “We understand that not everyone had the experience they hoped for,” and that “We are reviewing resolution options.”
Still, hope springs eternal. Wherever there is a viral event disaster, potential careers can be made. Think of the blank-faced Scottish Oompa Loompa Kirsty Paterson, who was able to pivot her ballooning social media presence to score an appearance on Good Morning Britain. Think of the poor 16-year-old who played The Unknown at the Wonka experience, who was subsequently offered a job at the London Dungeon. Think of how the whole sorry Wonka affair was faithfully reproduced and ironically restaged in Los Angeles, and how someone made an entire musical of it, and got John Stamos to sing the songs.
This is the future that The Detroit Bridgerton Themed Ball can expect. Sure, right now it looks like a scam put on to fleece hundreds of good-hearted fans out of their hard-earned money. But any minute now, that pole dancer is going to become an international celebrity. Isn’t that all we want from this sort of thing?