The chocolate digestive biscuit, as manufactured aromatically in Harlesden, is 100 years old this year. And to celebrate the centenary McVitie's have opened a pop-up experience in Piccadilly Circus inside a former Barclays bank for one long weekend only. I am not making this up.
No booking is required, you just turn up and then the security guard will tell you politely that this is not the end of the queue you need to join the sub-queue round the corner. It didn't take too long to get to the front on Friday morning, although it's one-in one-out so could get seriously cloggy by Monday afternoon. On the way in everyone receives a special blue card offering one go at the Biscuit Bar and one turn on the Spin To Win, plus a promotional QR code on the rear. Obviously the intention is to leave you enamoured of chocolate digestives and keener to buy the premium packs, but I preferred to view the experience as a prime example of how to conjure up marketing out of pretty much nothing.
The Biscuit Bar offers every visitor a multi-topped digestive, either curated by a Michelin-trained chef or squirted on in a pic'n'mix stack-your-own. I was nudged cheerfully towards the latter, so eschewed a daring wasabi fusion and was instead rewarded by being allowed to have all three chocolate hot sauces dripped onto my dark biscuit. The final messy concoction resembled something a sweet-toothed eight year-old might demand at a dessert bar and, at first bite, snapped awkwardly sending a shower of marshmallow to the floor. The pile of serviettes close by was a must.
Spin To Win proved to be a big wheel with merch as prizes, and also had a really long queue because every spin took the best part of a minute while waiting for rotation to stop. Potential gifts included digestive hats, digestive mugs, digestive socks and digestive t-shirts, although half the sectors offered actual digestives in a variety of minor sizes which were plainly the booby prizes. The couple behind me were convinced the wheel was rigged, forever nudging away from the good stuff, but they ended up with a jackpot jersey whereas I did indeed end up with the booby 2-pack of biscuits which I had to eat quickly before they melted.
Elsewhere in the space you could sense the event's brainstorming meeting had got increasingly desperate. A large game of Connect 4 with double-side digestives as pieces. A photo booth for souvenir snaps and a spinning teacup for souvenir selfies. An "immersive walk-through timeline", which proved to be a few boards everyone was ignoring because the Spin To Win queue ran alongside. And at the rear a set of three portraits of iconic Britons Sir Trevor McDonald, David Bowie and Dame Judi Dench, painstakingly created as biscuit mosaics over 180 hours by artist Ed Chapman. BBC local news actually turned up to film a feature about the digestive mosaics, which I suspect the creative team must have been ecstatic about.
If nothing else the Chocolate Digestives Experience is providing a few days of employment for several professionally jolly people, all throwing themselves faultlessly into the spirit of the event. The location in Piccadilly Circus did mean a lot of foreign tourists were wandering in and diluting the marketing potential somewhat, given only a small number of people are ever going to attend. Also holding a chocolate-related event in a heatwave wasn't ideal, although the weather should adjust over the weekend to solve that problem entirely. And sorry McVitie's but, lovely though your biscuits are, I can buy a larger pack of own-brand chocolate digestives for less than half the price and will be continuing to do so.
