Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was in many ways the perfect competition-reality show, years before the term had been invented. A morality play at heart, it took various ghastly character types and watched as they all came a cropper in a race to win a prize.
Netflix’s Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, apart from being a grammatical abhorrence, makes you wonder whether the executives who bought the rights to the Dahl catalogue in 2021 for an estimated £500m have read the books. Were Dahl alive, you can imagine him hurriedly scribbling down a new story (James and the Giant Stream? The Magic Binger?) about adults with lots of money who somehow still fail to get the point.
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket begins by doling out said golden tickets to 12 lucky people (there’s no explanation on what basis) and then invites them into the Chocolate Factory, a cheap-looking film set, to compete in a series of loosely Wonka-based tasks. Gene Wilder appears only as a creepy AI-generated voice (“recreated with the consent of the Gene Wilder estate”, a caption informs us). The Oompa Loompas march in, still with baked-bean faces, but in a sop to 21st-century diversity laws, some of them are not dwarves (one is even big and bald). The winner gets a lifetime’s supply not of chocolate but of delicious, creamy money – $3m (£2.25m), to be exact.
Because compliance won’t allow people to get their just desserts in the macabre manner that Dahl and his readers so loved – getting sucked up in pipes because they’re greedy or ejected into rubbish chutes because they’re spoilt and horrible – the actual challenges in Wonka’s The Golden Ticket are largely anodyne. Most of them involve a trip into the Wonkavision studio, but instead of shrinking our contestants and transporting them to the other side of the room, this just lands them in a series of other American game shows such as Wheel of Fortune or Deal or No Deal.
So much time, so little to do: the whole thing is distended more than Mike Teavee after a session in the gum-stretching room. There are eight hours, incredibly, of hopefuls wandering around on edible grass and overreacting furiously to things they must know are fake (their partners, to take one example, could never be “trapped” inside gumballs that come up to their waists, yet they feign complete dismay).
To fill the airtime, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket includes the now-mandatory elements from The Traitors, in which contestants scheme and lie, talk to camera about why they are scheming and lying and then congratulate themselves for doing it really well.
Incredibly, the show keeps returning to Wonkavision while forgetting that Wonkavision was itself one of Dahl’s allegories. Mike Teavee was a nine-year-old boy who did nothing but watch television. He jumped into Wonka’s new teleportation concept, ignoring his warnings that it wasn’t yet perfected, and got his comeuppance. Sometimes television itself has a similar tendency.
Ironically,Wonka’s The Golden Ticket is precisely the kind of television that Mike Teavee would have loved. As for Roald Dahl? I suspect not.
