Heydon Prowse's story, as told to by Elizabeth McCafferty
At the beginning of lockdown, everyone was going on about 5G conspiracies, people like Ryan from Blue, Amanda Holden, M.I.A..Then there was Trump pushing all sorts of theories. It was almost like conspiracy theories themselves were a virus infecting everyone’s brain. I was also very bored, so I decided to get an old Virgin circuit board, went to an art shop and bought some silver alphabetical stickers and stuck COV-19 on it.
I dressed in a high vis jacket, stood under a 5G tower and filmed myself doing a really bad Liverpudlian accent explaining that I’ve just found this circuit board that says COV-19 on it. I then bought a taste the difference microwave lasagna and explained that the 5G cooked it straight through because it’s a ‘direct energy weapon'.
My plan was to make a film about starting a conspiracy theory and how easy it would be to fool others. I put it online - Twitter, Facebook groups some conspiracy forums etc and nothing happened for a couple of weeks. Then suddenly it blew up, it literally got a million views in Bangladesh and a crazy amount of shares online; it started going viral. It hit global news and was shared by some of Trumps biggest supporters. I thought Jesus Christ, someone’s gonna burn down a fucking 5G mast or something and I’m gonna get sued. It only really went viral abroad in America and stuff because most people in Britain didn’t actually believe my accent. That being said, David Icke did actually repost it. Conveniently though, many of the conspiracy theorists who reposted left out the bit about the lasagne.
My friends started getting really angry with me saying ‘this is really irresponsible, you need to put out this film debunking if as soon as possible’.
The conspiracy theory sites that were reposting it eventually started working out it's fake. It was almost like it was inculcating people against their own bullshit because people on the sites were doing their own research into it and then realising it wasn't real.
By the time the film came out, most of the people knew it was a hoax and had gone on some mad journey debunking it. Hopefully it actually made them all doubt their own beliefs, that was kinda the objective I guess. Even today thought it still randomly goes viral again on the internet and this whole cycle restarts.
You can’t convince conspiracy theorists that things are fake, you have to convince them with things like these sometimes. Whilst many took my video down, it’s still circulating on a lot of platforms..I guess I found a whole new niche in my comedy in the form of crazy alt-right Trump supporters.