How An Awkward Discovery Became A Hilarious Podcast

Pornography and your father - that's two things you may care about deeply, but wish to keep completely separate. Spare a thought, then, for UK author/comedian Jamie Morton, who a few years ago received news of the creative pursuit his dad had engaged in during the early part of his retirement. 

"He told me he wrote a book, which I thought was amazing," recalls Morton. "And he said he was going to send me the first few chapters, but not to tell the girls; meaning my mum and my sister. I should have smelt a rat immediately when he said that, but I didn't."

When the first pages of his father's opus arrived via email, Morton was a little taken aback. After all, he was expecting a spy novel "or something swashbuckling with pirates". What he received, however, would change his life forever. Because under the pen name Rocky Flintstone, Morton's dad had written the erotic adventures of kitchenware saleswoman Belinda Blumenthal. Yep, that's right: Morton's dad wrote a porno.

And while Morton initially found himself thinking he should close his laptop and forget all about the very existence of Flintstone's smutty saga Belinda Blinked 1, which saw Ms Blumenthal enthusiastically dallying with everyone from a lusty duchess to a micro-cocked Texan, curiosity prevailed. Good news too, because that was the origin of My Dad Wrote A Porno, a podcast that has generated a cult following worldwide.

Alongside friends and comedy colleagues Alice Levine and James Cooper, Morton regales listeners with a chapter of Belinda Blinked a week, the trio affectionately ripping Flintstone's god-awful prose to shreds when they're not falling about in peals of laughter. Oh, and occasionally reminding Morton that his 60-something father is the man responsible for some explicit-but-decidedly unsexy descriptions of the act of lovemaking.   

"Yeah, Alice needs to stop doing that," smiles Morton. "Every time I think I'm close to getting a handle on it, she'll go, 'You know it's your dad, right, Jamie?' How could I ever not be aware that my dad wrote this? It's forever present in my mind. Disturbing on so many levels but, fuck me, it's funny."

The notion of the podcast came about when Morton started reading selections from the first Belinda Blinked novel (yes, the first - the podcast is current in the middle of the third book and there are more to come) to a handful of mates, including Levine and Cooper, down the pub one night.

"They've all known my dad for a decade or more and they thought it was brilliant," he says. "And we started doing what we do on the podcast, dissecting it as I read it. James, Alice and I have done little projects together ever since we met - we did a web series before My Dad Wrote A Porno - and it felt like this was a natural next project for us."

Embracing the podcast format was new for Morton and his friends, but the risque nature of the material helped seal the deal, so to speak. "We were thinking it was maybe a YouTube thing or that we could take it to the Edinburgh Festival as a theatre piece," he says. "But we decided that a podcast was the perfect medium for something that's a little bit naughty, something you may not want people knowing that you're listening to. There's intimacy to this medium as well, and it really feels as if you're part of the gang when you're listening, which is what we always wanted."

Still, Morton admits that he was worried the whole thing would fall flat, that no one would find My Dad Wrote A Porno particularly funny - a distinct possibility when it describes its half-naked heroine with the words, "Her tits hung freely like pomegranates," or deploys the odd gynaecological term "vaginal lids". But it has found its audience, and Morton is especially pleased that it has done so organically. "It genuinely feels like a show that has become a hit through word of mouth," he says. "It's been shared around like a dirty little secret."  

And now My Dad Wrote A Porno is going from the airwaves to the stage, with Morton, Levine and Cooper bringing their show Down Under for a series of live shows after successful performances in the UK.

"When my dad started writing, he would send me all this crap - sometimes just bullet points, sometimes actual sentences - and one of the chapters he wrote never ended up in a book, but I thought it was just amazing," says Morton.

"Last year we were invited to take part in the London Podcast Festival - they said we should do a live show, and we were working out the form it should take - and I remembered the chapter no one had heard, and it became the special chapter we read at the live shows. And then there's audience participation, video components, re-enactments of certain things. We never get to experience people's enjoyment of the podcast because, well, it's a podcast. People get in touch via Twitter and such, which is lovely, but to see and hear the live reactions to dad's writing has been so much fun. We'd love to do that all over the world."

That's what she said. Oo-er!

My Dad Wrote A Porno appears live around Australia from 17 Aug.