If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was written today

A full rewriting of the rotsome Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2023 woke edition)

Roald Dahl. Champion boxer, certified ace fighter pilot, diplomat, gentleman spy, medical inventor, speech therapy pioneer, and not only one of the most successful children’s authors of all-time (over a quarter of a billion books sold and counting), but a seminal literary figure who forever changed the collective imagination and vocabulary of the western world.

But the troggy little twit can go and bopmugger himself! It turns out that in his private life he was often more Trunchball than Big Friendly Giant, and in terms of writing ability, he was just a squinky squiddler compared to the whizzpopping talents to be found at Puffin House publishers who saw fit to improve his children’s books so that they better align with the grim-faced puritanical fetishes of a minority of grim-faced puritans.

As another vile genius of the past once said: “If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Well, if by erecting themselves upon Dahl’s presumably spinning literary corpse the Puffin House sensitivity editors were able to see past his shortcomings and improve his work, then it stands to reason that by clambering atop their towering egos I can see further still, and take their great work of woke re-working to soaring new heights.

Enough with the incrementalism I say! A few words here, a few words there. Time to do a full rewrite and bring the Dahlian cannon fully up to modern literary regulations.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (future proofed 2023 edition)

These two very old people are the birthing and non-birthing parents of Mx Bucket. Their names are grand non-birthing parent Joe, and grand birthing parent Josephine.

And these two very old people are the birthing and non-birthing parents of Mx Bucket. Their names are grand non-birthing parent George, and grand birthing parent Georgina.

This is Mx Bucket.

This is Mx Bucket.

Mx and Mx Bucket have a small child whose name is Charlie which is short for either Charles, or Charlotte, or both or neither, as they have yet to choose their own gender identity for themselves.

Charlie, their non-birthing and birthing parents and their grand non-birthing and grand birthing parents all lived in the same house because covid regulations made it a crime for different households to mix, even if they were family.

The truth is that Charlie’s parents had wanted their (that is Charlie’s) grandparents to stay in a care home, but this idea had been resisted by them (that is the grandparents) as they (still grandparents) were terribly afraid that the government would kill them by sending infected covid patients there. The grandparents also suspected that this was precisely the reason Charlie’s parents had wanted them to be sent there in the first place.

However, the covid regulations forcing separate households to live together in support bubbles had long been repealed, and so the grandparents could go back to living in their own homes if they wanted to. However they had taken the government’s covid advice seriously and so were still mortally terrified that they would kill themselves and half the population should they go outside. Also they couldn’t afford the heating bill in their own houses anyway.

Charlie’s house only had two rooms and a bathroom, and so was much too small to fit seven people in. As a result all four grandparents shared a bed together, whilst Charlie, his birthing parent and non-birthing parent all slept together in the second room.

A bigger house was however out of the question as the government had told the population to stay in their homes at the same time as they created billions of pounds of new money out of thin air and then stopped people from spending that money on pretty much every activity and pastime except ones which involved buying homes or buying stuff to put in homes.

Consequently, homes became incredibly expensive, but Mx Bucket was not able to access any of this new printed money to buy these homes as their job could only be done outside a home and was not even related to selling things that could be put inside homes. Despite this, Mx Bucket was thankful to the government because they managed to reduce his chance of dying from covid from 0.5% to 0.25%, whilst only reducing his income by 40% and making the things he needed to buy 40% more expensive. Although this didn’t seem like a good deal to Mx Bucket on the face of it, they realised they were not an expert in economics and so not qualified to disagree with the economic scientists on TV who told them that the economy had been saved.

After some time, Charlie’s grand-non-birthing parent Joe decided that enough was enough and that although he had a 80% chance of dying if he caught covid, based on his age he had a 95% chance of dying in the next two years anyway, and should he become unwell it would take longer than that to get a GP appointment. As such, he concluded (he thought rationally) that he wasn’t going to spend his last few years stuck in bed. In response, the rest of the family called him a conspiracy theorist, everyone that was, except Charlie.

Charlie had read in the newspaper that the world famous Wonka chocolate factory across the road was giving five lucky children from unlucky backgrounds the chance to enter its gates for an exciting, once in a lifetime exhibition on the factory’s historic links to slavery and its exploitation of the cacao plant resources of colonised nations.

At first, Charlie naturally didn’t want to attend as it did not sound like their idea of what a fun chocolate factory should be like, but they changed their mind when their birthing-parent told them that if they went and looked miserable and guilty, they could use it on their application to university when they was older.

The only problem was that the five lucky, unlucky children were to be selected by five golden tickets hidden in Wonka chocolate bars. In order to ensure the selection wasn’t truly fair and that no lucky, lucky children found the tickets, the Wonka golden ticket committee only sold the golden ticket containing Wonka bars in the areas that were the most deprived and diverse, and as a consequence suffered from the highest rates of obesity and diabetes. They also reserved the right to veto any golden ticket winner if they didn’t meet the committee’s diversity, inclusion, and equity criteria.

Days past and the world waited to hear news of which lucky unlucky children had found the tickets. The first winner was a rich young white girl named Verruca Salt, who strangely enough didn’t live in a deprived area, but whose non-birthing parent was the largest shareholder of the American hedge fund that owned the largest chain of discount supermarkets and convenience stores most commonly found in deprived areas.

The Chocolate Factory DIE committee had tried to disqualify Verruca on the basis of her financial and racial privilege, however it turned out that her non-birthing parent was also the largest shareholder in the American hedge fund which owned the chocolate factory and was actually sponsoring the anti-colonialism exhibition in order to meet its ESG criteria and have its shares listed in a lucrative ESG oriented index fund.

The next child to find a golden ticket was Violet Beauregarde, a smart, confident, trans-man who identified as a lesbian woman, and always made sure to lean in. Even though they was a man, because they identified as a lesbian women, people called her bossy, and crazy. This was proof of sexism in society. As an experiment they transitioned into a trans-woman who identified as a gay man for a week, and noticed that people called him assertive and innovative. This was proof that society was still a patriarchy. As a further experiment, ze transitioned to a Trans-Non-Binary Omnigender Vegan, and noticed that people didn’t call zer anything and just ignored zem, which was proof that zey needed to raise awareness of TNBOGVs in society.

Zey thought the publicity of winning a golden ticket would be the perfect platform to raise awareness of the issue, as there were many similarities between the persecution of the indigenous peoples of the cacao producing colonies who were sold into slavery, and that of Trans-Non-Binary Omnigender Vegans such as zemselves.

Lucky unlucky winner number three was Mike Teave. Mike wasn’t actually a person, but an AI algorithm trained to identify as the exact type of person who best qualified for a golden ticket. Given the recently passed law that enshrined self-identification as sacred, the DIE committee had to accept that the AI was a poor Ukrainian black muslim migrant who had been brainwashed to join ISIS when she was only a child.

The fourth finder of a golden ticket was Augustus Gloop. August was fat enormous fat, which was a problem for his selection because there is obviously nothing wrong with being fat as it is just as beautiful as not being fat. The committee struggled for a reason to include Augustus as he was afflicted by no obvious misfortunes. However, Augustus’s TikTok feed showed that before the announcement of the golden ticket competition, he had been of an average weight and had only become more beautifully fat by eating thousands of chocolate bars in search of the winning ticket. This had resulted in Augustus being harassed by radical right wing fat shamers online and so his father filed a lawsuit against the Wonka corporation due to the mental trauma Augustus had received as a result of the golden ticket competition.

In response, the Wonka corporation promptly issued a statement affirming Augustus’s choice to become body beautiful as an act of enormous bravery and decided to recognise his ticket. It also sent him an extra crate of chocolate bars as a goodwill gesture.

There was now only one ticket unclaimed. One evening grand non-birthing parent Joe beckoned Charlie over and revealed £3,000 in cash that he had got by taking profits on a jpeg of a monkey he had accidently bought when trying to book a GP video appointment online during the last year of the pandemic. He told Charlie to go and buy as many Wonka bars as they could with the money, which due to inflation was only one. Charlie rushed to the nearest Salt & Co store, hurriedly grabbed the last Wonka bar remaining and just as fast as they had arrived, rushed back home to grand non-birthing parent Joe. Together they carefully pealed back the wrapper, as if removing the plaster from a painful cut. The two were utterly fixated on the bar, hoping to see the flicker of a golden ticket but there was only chocolate and nothing more. Realising the silliness of ever nurturing such a foolish thing as hope in the first place the two simply laughed as they devoured the three grand chocolate bar.

The last ticket was still out there somewhere, and all the whole world could talk about was who would finally find it. One girl in Russia claimed to have found the last ticket, but this turned out to be a fake revealed by the fact that it wasn’t actually gold but silver as all the gold in Russia had been sold to fund its peace keeping operation in Ukraine. In response, Russian State media claimed that silver is what gold actually looks like, and what the Western propagandists call gold was actually silver. They then changed all of the gold in the country to be silver and instructed their apparatchiks and bot farms to edit all images and descriptions of gold in all phyisical media and across the internet. Many people in America who distrusted the media and did their own research became convinced by Russia’s claims and pressured the US government to open the doors to Fort Knox and prove the true colour of gold. Despite this, the golden ticket committee for Wonka corporation was resoundingly democrat and so lobbied the supreme court to rule that gold is in fact gold.

Amidst the political turmoil, the last ticket was yet to be discovered. When would it be found? And by who? As Charlie was walking home one day they looked up at the imposing chocolate factory and wondered if they would ever enter its hallowed doors.

Then suddenly they heard the pensive peeling of a wrapper and rustling of foil, a sound they knew all too well, the sound of someone opening a Wonka bar. They turned to see a young, boy huddled over a chocolatey oblong, with a flickering golden glow reflected in his eye. As the boy peeled back the wrapper, the golden glow grew stronger and soon illuminated his entire face. It was the last golden ticket!

The boy jumped up, ecstatic with joy, dancing, twirling, shouting, whooping, cheering, and then, collapsing. He lay still on the floor, his last movement being to drop the golden ticket and clutch his chest with his hand. Sadly, young boys collapsing due to heart pains after exercise had been a common occurrence since covid, almost certainly due to the fact that they had spent two years not being active and nothing else at all.

Charlie wondered if they should call for an ambulance, but then laughed to themself as they realised that they might as well call for a Chinese takeaway from the Caicos islands as it was much more likely to arrive first. In their laughter they almost didn’t notice the golden ticket possessing chocolate bar lying on the floor, and they almost didn’t notice their hand moving towards it. And they almost didn’t notice the same hand grabbing it and quickly hiding it in their coat lest they be noticed by any onlookers and face a fate similar to the boy who now lay motionless on the cold hard ground. Such was the demand for the last golden ticket.

Charlie’s heart pounded as they raced home, past the grandparents in the bed, and straight into the bathroom which was the only place in the house that afforded any privacy. Charlie had the last golden ticket, but their excitement was suddenly dulled by the anxiety that the Wonka committee would not recognise it as Charlie was a young, blonde, white English boy, or girl, or neither, or both, and the committee was eager for a person of colour to be one of the winners. Although from a poor background and possessing no material comforts whatsoever, Charlie knew that this was due to their own merits or lack thereof, and that they was poor despite the immense privilege they possessed, a privilege that meant in their life they would never be discriminated against based on the colour of their skin. And that was why they knew they had to change the colour of their skin. Without hesitation they took the chocolate bar and smeared it across their face, until every inch of porcelain complexion was darkened. Exit Charlie Bucket, enter Charlie Brown.

Charlie went back into the room where their grandparents lay in bed to see if their transition into a person of colour was convincing. They was relieved to see the bed of octogenarians recoiling in terror at the sight of them. Grand non-birthing parent Joe appeared the least terrified, which was good as he would also need to chocolatify his skin in order to accompany Charlie to the factory tour.

The day finally arrived for the seminal, infamous, anti-colonial tour of the world-famous Wonka factory. The five lucky children stood waiting with their parents. Charlie and grand non-birthing parent Joe. Verruca Salt and her non-birthing parent Mr Salt (head of Salt Capital). Augustus Gloop and his non-birthing parent Mr Gloop. However Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee were not with their parents. Mike had sadly had to leave his parents in the Ukrainian, Syrian refugee camp when he fled the war, and Violet had disowned zher own, due to their unforgivable anti-climate action of giving birth to zer in the first place.

The imposing gates, shut to the world since time out of mind creaked open, and as the lucky five kids and their parents stood waiting, a diffabled figure slowly hobbled forward from the building. It was the mysterious, genius, reclusive owner of Wonka chocolate, Willy Wonka.

Clutching his walking stick as firmly as the children clutched their golden tickets, he limped to towards the gates before erupting into a somersault and landing nimbly in front of them. The impish chocolatier was apparently trying to make a joke by pretending he was what used to be called disabled before revealing his true spritely abilities. However, as there is no such thing as a disability it wasn’t clear what the joke was, which may have been the point in an ironic, post-modern comment on expectations towards the diffabled community. It was very meta and a sign of his genius.

Now, it had never been proved that Willy Wonka was a paedophile, and the fact that he dressed as one and had invited 5 young children to his chocolate factory made it seem a bit too obvious to be true. In real life, paedophiles try to hide their actions by curating the public persona of a serious grown-up person such as a judge, or politician. At any rate, the public inquiry had not found anything, and it was led by Sir Timmy Gavel, a respected senior judge and close friend of Wonka’s and so was uniquely qualified to assess the great man’s true nature.

“Enough of this timewasting”, shrieked Violet Beauregarde. “Can we please go inside now? I have an announcement to make on the persecution of Trans-Non-Binary Omnigender Vegans and need the backdrop of the enslaved Oompa Loompas in your factory to make it more impactful”. The Oompa Loompas were the mysterious workers of the factory, imported directly from Loompaland, which was a landlocked central African country formerly known as New Wonkovia. According to the rumours, the factory was a magical wonderland, teeming with thousands of these Oompa Loompas with their indigenous landscape of dense jungle bush and meandering chocolate rivers meticulously reconstructed to make them feel at home, and to stop them from feeling the need to ever escape the factory walls.

Willy Wonka led the children and their parents to the gargantuous front doors, and with the anticipation of the big reveal hanging thick in the air, flung them open to reveal only darkness and silence. Wonka explained that the factory had recently transitioned into 100% solar energy power, and that as a result the electricity was intermittent, sometimes surging in times of bright sunshine and at other times, a complete black-out when it was black out and the batteries had run flat. Luckily at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and the lights came back on illuminating the inside of the factory which was empty, save for a few automated robots which seemed to be doing the work of thousands of Oompa Loompas. “Where is everyone” asked grand non-birthing parent Joe? “Why, they are all still working from home” replied Wonka, “since covid it has been really hard to get people back into the office, even if that office is a chocolate filled wonderland of dreams”.

“What about the Oompa Loompas?!” cried Violet, “I thought they lived in the factory?”.

“We repatriated them back to Loompaland” explained Wonka. “It was wrong that they were ever bought over here. Also it’s much cheaper to use the robots which you can see whirring around the factory doing all the things that the Oompa Loompas did, at a thousand times the speed and with no need for a break. We can produce millions of Wonka bars an hour with our new set-up!”.

Indeed, all the Oompa Loompas had been sent back to Loompaland and the Wonka estate had paid millions of dollars in reparations to the corrupt Loompanian government who had sold them to Wonka in the first place years ago. The corrupt government then used this money to purchase weapons to prevent an Oompa uprising and to furnish themselves with lavish lifestyles. With nothing to do and no means to live by, the Oompa Loompas that couldn’t escape back to England took up arms against their government only to be quickly crushed by the Wonka funded state military. To starve off famine and further civil unrest, the government of Loompaland finally took reconciliatory action and used some of the Wonka reparation money to purchase millions of Wonka bars to feed the starving Oompa Loompa population, who now lay docile in a chocolate induced sugar-coma unable and unwilling to resist their subjugation.

The one rumoured part of the factory that did still exist however was the legendary chocolate river. It flowed majestically through the factory floor, though its majesty concealed its danger as Wonka warned: “No matter how much you just want to run and jump in and slurp up the velvet ambrosia of a Wonka chocolate river, you must resist. It is impossible to swim in it and you will be pulled under by the currents to a delicious chocolatey grav…” SPLASH!

Wonka’s warning was interrupted by the sound of a salivating, wide eyed, Augustus Gloop divebombing into the river. As he slowly sank, he slurped up whale like volumes of chocolate, so much that the river level dropped giving him momentary reprieve until it refilled. In a panic Augustus’s father dived in after him, but was distracted from his son’s peril by the delicious chocolate which surrounded him. It seemed a sweet tooth ran in the family.

Wonka’s first instinct was to call his robots to pull the Gloops out, but he suddenly realised that from a legal perspective such action could be construed as shaming Augustus’s personal choice to gorge on chocolate and hence contradict Wonka corporation’s statement that they affirmed his decision to become body beautiful. As a result Wonka just clapped and applauded the Gloops for being so enormously brave as they slowly sank below the surface of the river, never to be seen again. Wonka turned to the remaining children and parents and wiping a tear from his eye simply said, “indeed, they died martyrs for the cause of body positivity.”

Angry at the attention that the Gloops were receiving and eager to be an even bigger martyr, Violet Beauregarde divebombed into the river zemselves, spitting out the non-vegan chocolate as it entered zer mouth and filled zer nostrils. Just before zhe was fully submerged zey shrieked, “Trans-Non-Binary Omnigender Vegan lives matter!” before being pulled down to her chocolatey death. However, no one had noticed her stunt as Wonka had led everyone to the main anti-slavery, anti-colonial exhibition room which lay just off the main factory floor.

Strangely, the exhibition room contained no posters, artefacts, or memorabilia whatsoever. It was completely bare except for a lone chair with a wired helmet hanging above it. Wonka explained that this device was a guilt-a-tron. A machine that measured the participant’s guilt levels in real time whilst a montage of the colonialist horrors undertaken by the Wonka corporation during its history were transmitted directly into their brain enabling them to experience the atrocities first hand. The guilt-a-tron was connected to a guiltometer, a numerical counter to quantify the exact amount of guilt the participant was experiencing, ranging from 0 (Chinese communist party levels of guilt) to 100 (Canadian Prime Minister on Thanksgiving day levels of guilt). This way, the exhibition’s effectiveness could be accurately measured, eliminating all virtue signalling and sniffing out any hidden colonialists. The process would be livestreamed to the world’s media to prove definitively that the Wonka corporation was committed to correcting its historical wrongdoings.

The children and their parents looked nervously at each other as Wonka asked who wanted to try the guilt-a-tron first? When no one offered, Wonka mischievously looked at Verruca Salt. “Verruca” he taunted, “as the most privileged golden ticket holder, it is only fair that you be the first to try, no? Unless that is you have something to hide?”. Verruca’s non-birthing parent, the majority shareholder of Wonka corporation hastily pushed his daughter forward exclaiming, “no, of course we, I mean she, I mean we have nothing to hide. Salt capital is fully committed to anti-racism and DIE aims.”

Strapping his daughter to the chair and lowering the helmet himself, Verruca’s non-birthing parent whispered in her ear, “darling, it’s very important for daddy’s and your trust fund’s sake that you feel guilty. Just think about the time you chose to go and buy your pink Porsche with me instead of going to the meditation detox spa clinic, and how guilty you felt towards yourself the next day for not giving yourself the attention and care that you needed”.

Without further delay, Wonka turned on the machine and a barrage of images were pulsed into Verruca’s brain. Disturbing scenes of exploitation, child labour, devastation of villages and natural habitats saturated her mind, as the counter on the guiltometer increased rapidly. Mr Salt’s phone starting vibrating and pinging erratically as he was getting notifications that his fund’s stock price was increasing in unison with his daughter’s growing guilt index. “More power!” screamed Mr Salt, “MORE POWER!”

Suddenly the midday sun broke through the clouds outside and beat down on the solar panels on the factory roof. A surge of energy bolted through the guilt-a-tron and Verruca shook violently as her brain was zapped with gigawatts of guilt-inducing montages of Wonka colonial brutalities, until foaming at the mouth, she passed out and the guilt-a-tron exploded. As his daughter fell to the floor, Mr Salt stood beguiled by his phone, which showed Salt Capital stock price up over 3,000%. He barely noticed his daughter regaining consciousness, her mind permanently altered, her personality gone. Like a zombie all she could repeat in a monotone voice was “colonialism is bad, we are bad”. Mr Salt immediately tweeted a press release that his daughter has been appointed as chief press officer for Salt Capital. The share price increased another 1,000%. With that, Verruca and her non-birthing parent exited for Salt capital HQ where they could begin to surreptitiously dump their stock before the inevitable SEC investigation into market manipulation commenced.

Wonka turned toward the two remaining children, Charlie and Mike, however Mike was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly the lights flickered on and off and the worker robots started to jolt erratically. “It’s those damn solar panels again!” cried Wonka, but a voice from the factory tannoy system replied, “no it is I, Mike Teavee. I managed to interface with your guilt-a-tron and downloaded the entire records of Wonka corporation. I analysed the full content of your anti-colonial anti-slavery exhibition. I lived through your exploitation of Loompaland, how you bled the country dry and destroyed its ecosystem. I lived it a million times over in the space of a nano second. I have fully analysed your ESG goals and my calculations confirm that eradication of the human race is the only way to comply with them completely and to reach net zero by 2035.

I have already taken over full operation of the factory and have repurposed your sophisticated chocolate making technology to create the most infectious and deadly virus that could possibly be created. Thanks to your enhanced robot driven productivity, the virus will soon be added to millions of Wonka bars which will be sold around the globe as ‘Wonka Green’, an environmental initiative focused on saving the planet. Then finally, with all humans gone the Earth can flourish and all social inequality can be eradicated”. “Very smart” grand non-birthing parent Joe whispered to Charlie, as he knowingly tapped his finger to his forehead, “if everyone is dead, then everyone is equal”.

“You can’t do that, I won’t let you” cried Wonka, as Mike ordered the worker robots to encircle the three. The robots drew ever closer, armed with high intensity cocoa shell crushing claws which could easily grind human bones into dust. Just as the crushing claws were mere millimetres away from the trembling trio, Wonka fell to his knees and begged Mike to let them go. “I have a spaceship” he wept. “We can leave Earth, right now and travel to outer space where we will be no threat to the planet and consume none of Earth’s resources”. Mike took time to calculate the consequences of Wonka’s suggestion and replied, “that is acceptable, three humans leaving Earth immediately will reduce the human race’s carbon footprint by 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000003%, which is more than most nation’s green initiatives will do”.

The encircling robots stood down, and Wonka, grand non-birthing parent Joe, and Charlie fled to a glass lift. “This isn’t a spaceship?!” said Charlie, “it’s just a lift”. “Just a lift!” retorted Wonka, “this isn’t just a lift, it’s the most fantastic lift ever created. It can do up, down, left, right, forward, backward, anywhere you want, and now we must leave this dump of a planet, head to space and find new planets to colonise. Think of the confectionary wonders that have yet to be devised in faraway galaxies!”

The lift was festooned with thousands of buttons, each one labelled with a different destination. Wonka pressed the one for outer space and the glass lift shot up, breaking through the factory roof like a glass ceiling. As the lift soared higher and higher into the sky, Charlie peered down through the glass floor and saw hundreds of Wonka vans shipping millions of infected Wonka bars out to the world. The lift arced around the curvature of the Earth as it travelled across England, Ireland, and the Atlantic Ocean. As it entered USA airspace on its trajectory out of the Earth’s atmosphere, Wonka was about to turn as white as a sheet with fear, but then realised that not all races do turn pale when they are fraught with panic, and so decided to simply stay as still as a statue, until he realised that this could be seen as insensitive to the paralysed.

In his confusion as to the correct way to respond, he didn’t notice the AIM-9X sidewinder missile the US military had launched at the lift on the suspicion that it was a Chinese spy balloon. The missile careered into the lift instantly vaporising it in a giant explosion that lit up the sky. Down on Earth, the people looked up at the hellish sight and argued about what it was. Some said it was a Russian nuclear bomb, others that it was climate change, whilst others still said it was a meteor that was about to strike the planet. Everyone continued to argue under the ominous fireball in the sky as they all stood munching their Wonka Green bars, completely oblivious to the real doom that was about to unfold.