Friend in need
Jay Richardson interviews the cast of My Dad Wrote a Porno
From being one of the world’s most popular podcasts, with more than 100 million downloads to date, My Dad Wrote A Porno is now a touring phenomenon. Since appearing at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe with one of its earliest live productions, Porno has continued to play internationally and is about to make history at the Royal Albert Hall this summer with the world’s biggest ever podcast gig.
Jamie Morton, Alice Levine and James Cooper, who host the show, had been worried that its risqué title risked keeping them out of America, that “Trump wouldn’t let us in” Cooper laughs. “At customs they asked us what we were doing and we were just like, ‘performance ….’, keeping it as vague as possible”.
Loath to miss an opportunity for promotion though, “where there’s two boxes asking whether you’re here for business or pleasure, we told them that the Belinda Blinked books are the perfect combination of business and pleasure.” Levine jokes.
However, Morton suggests that their global appeal might have more to do with prudish Brits reading eccentric filth. “It’s like Ron, Hermione and Harry reading out pornography to them,” he reflects. “It’s such a disconnect for foreigners.”
For those unfamiliar with My Dad Wrote A Porno, each episode features Morton reading a chapter from Belinda Blinked, a series of erotic novellas written by his father under the nom-de-porn Rocky Flintstone, with Cooper and Levine joining their friend in critiquing Belinda’s lurid, grammatically inventive and often wildly implausible sexscapades in the pots and pans industry.
With a fourth series out later this year, celebrity fans who’ve appeared on the Footnotes discussion episodes include Elijah Wood, Daisy Ridley, Nicholas Hoult and Michael Sheen. Rocky, a retired Northern Irish builder in his sixties, prefers to keep his anonymity, yet is continuing to churn out the purple prose from his garden shed.
Morton, a director and producer of shows such as The X-factor, on which Cooper also produced, and Levine, a Radio 1 DJ, first met and became friends at Leeds University. They’re relishing returning to Scotland after performing two nights at the Fringe, with Levine calling the experience “so surreal”.
“Obviously, we’re all big comedy fans, we’ve all followed our favourite performers going up there, it’s a rites of passage. And then we’re there with Jamie’s dad’s erotic material. Although it was only a short while, it was definitely bucket list. What was funny though was all these people coming to hear these weird fantasies. Amongst all the other unusual stuff at the Fringe, it suddenly seemed quite normal.”
Contrasting the intimate, often solitary experience of listening to a podcast, the live show – based on a “lost” chapter even Rocky considered too extreme for his canon, about a team-building weekend turning into an orgy – features plenty of audience participation and Levine correcting some of Rocky’s dubious grasp of the female anatomy. “There’s a party atmosphere,” she says of a show that attracts plenty of fans in costumes as their favourite characters, be that Belinda, The Duchess or even the trellises that Belinda has been handcuffed to. “It’s the dirtiest sort of club that you’ve ever been to. So people get pretty merry. Lots of people come on their own and meet for the first time talking in the bar at the interval about this odd little book.”
The title of the podcast initially meant that itunes refused to list it and advertisers were reluctant to come on board. “It still causes problems,” says Levine, “because people think it’s a podcast about porn, whereas really, it’s a comedy podcast. And it’s not as sordid or saucy as perhaps you might hope. itunes are now supportive. It just takes a bit of getting used to. [Porno] isn’t a word that we thought was particularly rude when we named it but it’s the one that some people have struggled with.”
Morton concurs. “It’s essentially about friendship, it’s not really about pornography at all, that’s just a backdrop. It’s about me reading this book with my two best mates, them being funny and helping me through this awful event in my life with humour. The title belies the fact that it’s actually quite a warm show and not really about sex at all.”
Levine reckons that the perverts who seek it out have balanced out
“People think it’s a podcast about porn, whereas really, it’s a comedy podcast”
the squeamish types who’ve resisted it so far. But “you come for the porn, you stay for the friendship” Morton reiterates.
Still, have the #Timesup and #Metoo campaigns forced them to reassess Rocky’s output in the wake of recent sexual harassment scandals?
“Not really.” says Morton. “We’ve always looked at the books as being really sex positive – they’re told from a female perspective, which is actually quite rare when you think about pornography and erotica. That’s something that we’ve always really embraced, that these books are about women who are in control and it’s the men that are underwritten.”
With series three ending on an espionage cliffhanger, the trio have found themselves once again re-evaluating Rocky’s literary talent.
“That was the most impressed by him we’ve been to date,” Levine confirms. “And we oscillate don’t we? Sometimes we’re like ‘God, this is the utter pits’. And then other times, we’re impressed by his inventiveness. James was almost driven insane by that last chapter.”
“I was!” Cooper admits. “And the
joke is increasingly on us, because the more live shows we do, you see how connected people have become with this book now. They dress up as the characters and it’s all they want to talk about. There’s no plot to speak of, yet somehow they find a way. So as much as we rib him and take the mick out of the text, you can’t deny that it has connected with people and that he’s created a world.”
Unprecedented as the podcast’s success is, the three are enjoying the embrace of the comedy world and are seeking to adapt the format for film or television. Passed from father to son and shared in horror with friends, My
Dad Wrote A Porno is the most bizarre of family businesses, with Morton admitting that “we’re cultivating this dynasty of pornography. I should really change my surname to Flintstone to be honest, just bite the bullet and do it.
“We’ve all worked on things together and separately in the media. But we’ve never been a part of something like this. If my lasting legacy is to be my dad’s porn, then so be it.”