Baffling smut: How My Dad Wrote a Porno set the gold standard for podcast success

When Jamie Morton decided that reading his father’s embarrassing erotica could make for a good podcast idea, he had no idea it would grow into a worldwide phenomenon. As the show comes to end after seven years, he and co-hosts James Cooper and Alice Levine talk to Isobel Lewis about how the industry has grown exponentially with – and perhaps because of – their show

From L-R: Jamie Morton, Alice Levine and James Cooper filming the ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ HBO special (HBO)

Nobody is more baffled by the success of My Dad Wrote a Porno than the people who made My Dad Wrote a Porno. Since the podcast was first released in 2015, its hosts Jamie Morton, James Cooper, and Alice Levine have done the seemingly impossible: turn a ludicrously daft, XXX-rated concept into one of the world’s most popular pods. They’ve carved out a new path for podcasting success, armed only with a book of bewildering smut, written by an author with a very loose grip on grammar. For the show’s legion of listeners, Cooper says, the joy has come from “watching how this silly idea, this ridiculous practical joke, has escalated over time… First, it was the book, then we did some UK tours that became a world tour. Then we played the biggest podcast show ever, then we did the HBO special and everyone’s like, ‘How did that become that?’” Speaking over Zoom, they all seem genuinely mystified. “People like an underdog story, don’t they?” says Levine. “Maybe it’s that?”

As podcasts go, you won’t find one with a snappier title or elevator pitch than My Dad Wrote a Porno. The conceit is pretty self-explanatory: Morton’s father has started writing erotica (using the pseudonym Rocky Flinstone) about a sexy pots-and-pans saleswoman called Belinda Blumenthal. Morton reads his father’s fantasies aloud, chapter by chapter, while Cooper and Levine rip each sentence to shreds. Take one of the most famous lines from Rocky’s book, in which Belinda’s nipples are compared to “the three-inch rivets which had held the hull of the fateful Titanic together”. That’s what they’re dealing with.

Seven years, 82 chapters, six Christmas specials and numerous additional episodes later, the podcast is finally bowing out (although they hint it may continue in another form). The show ended in style, with an epic, weirdly emotional two-part final chapter and, most excitingly of all, an interview with the mysterious dad himself released on Monday.

Cooper and Levine’s commentary is what elevates MDWAP, but the root of the comedy comes from Rocky’s book series, Belinda Blinked. Part stomach-churning smut, part-business manual, the stories incorporate espionage, equestrianism and loads and loads of boinking. To be clear, this is not sexy sex – were erotica eligible, the books would be a shoo-in for the Bad Sex in Fiction award. It’s the kind of podcast that causes you to physically stifle laughter on public transport, or, as many listeners have claimed, crash their cars. With such a huge back catalogue, the show has only grown more popular, as fans listen, then relisten again and again. Today, Morton tells me, the show still gains 10,000 new listeners every day.

Morton, Cooper and Levine met at university and all have backgrounds in TV and radio production. They maintain that MDWAP is “the best idea the three of us have had to date” and say they instantly knew it had legs. But what that meant in 2015 was unclear. The medium wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is now, when there are more than one million different shows on Apple Podcasts. Beyond true-crime smash Serial, very few podcasts at the time had broken into the mainstream and for many people, MDWAP was the first podcast they ever heard. “I mean, for good or bad, we presented them to people,” Levine says, with a laugh.

The notion that podcasting could be a career hadn’t even crossed their minds, and the team would work full-time jobs, then make the show in the evenings. “Looking back now, I don’t quite know how we did it really,” Cooper ponders. “We were young, James, we were young,” Morton says. Cooper rolls his eyes. “Yeah, and foolish.”

Nowadays, podcasting is a buzzy and lucrative art form – no wonder every celebrity from Paris Hilton to Meghan Markle has their own show – whereas in 2015, the few brands sponsoring shows weren’t too keen to be associated with pornography. But it soon became clear there was space for MDWAP to go beyond audio. Bizarrely, the trio were asked to perform their first-ever live show at the Sydney Opera House, before they’d even started planning a tour.

‘When we started, podcasting was viewed as the poor cousin... Now people would go podcast first, it wouldn’t be this second thought’ (Matt Crockett)

While many podcasts have upped sticks, signing hefty deals to exclusively post their past and future content on certain platforms (The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy), MDWAP resisted. “We’ve been offered them, for sure,” Morton says. “[But] it’s been such a homegrown show and we’ve built an audience so organically… that we want to keep it ours and keep it on as many platforms as possible and free to consume.” Cooper agrees, adding: “If you’re invested in the story in season four and we’re like, ‘Nope, goodbye,’ it would feel like a bit of a betrayal to the audience.”

So while the show remained free, MDWAP expanded outwards into new territory. Levine had worked as a presenter on Radio 1 for years and felt like audio was a little “ephemeral”. These achievements – the TV special, the merchandise and tours (in May, they played five consecutive nights at the London Palladium) – felt more concrete, like the concept “would live forever, somehow… [Now] we’re actually making a book, in bookshops, that has to go in the British Library. They sort of legally can’t not have this.”

In the early days, there had been discussions about turning the podcast into a TV show (they describe it as a straight adaptation of the podcast with video elements), but pulled out of the project because it “wasn’t quite right tonally”. By the time the HBO offer rolled around, the team had a better sense of what MDWAP was, and what they wanted it to be; a sitdown reading of a special episode that couldn’t be heard on the podcast itself. As a statement to establish themselves in the comedy scene, it didn’t get much better than that, either. “We were on after Game of Thrones in its final season and we were like, ‘What the actual hell?’” Morton says, through incredulous laughter. “It’s one of those weird things that feels like it didn’t happen, in a really surreal way, because it was just so bonkers.”

But with the podcast growing exponentially, there was concern that the show could lose its spark. Rocky wrote the first four Belinda Blinked books before MDWAP was released. When the show ran out of pre-podcast material in season five, would the writing feel less organic, more manufactured? Levine says they had anticipated that “glaring callbacks” to their comments might appear in the new books, but Rocky remained oblivious. “What makes the show so funny is that he’s remained insulated from what actually is funny about these books,” she says. “Yeah, he really doesn’t understand what makes the show successful at all, which is brilliant,” Morton adds. “He thinks he does, but he doesn’t.” Rocky is still somewhat of an enigma, but the hosts hope the interview episode will let listeners hear his side of the story, finally. “I found it really emotional actually,” Morton says. “It’s been such a crazy journey for me and my dad, and then to have it ending with us opposite each other, on mic… I just loved it.”

‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ live at the Royal Albert Hall (ROH)

The show’s charm and the format, however, have never changed. That lack of variation could be a turn-off, but it’s what keeps the fans coming back – the plot is so inconsequential, you can basically listen to episodes on shuffle. Cooper, Levine and Morton even make the show in the same way, sat around one of their kitchen tables, with Morton personally editing every episode himself. The fans feel like they’re part of the gang and have allowed the podcast to soundtrack the biggest of life (and world) events. During the pandemic, the team received a message from a listener who would listen to old episodes while developing the Covid vaccine. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s strange but amazing,’” says Morton.

In the years since MDWAP first aired, this show and the podcast format have grown in tandem. Once a “wild west” industry, it’s now “going beyond where we ever were, which is exciting, into a whole kind of new medium”, Cooper says. “And kudos, right?” Levine adds. “When we started, it was [viewed as] the poor cousin. Particularly for me working in live radio, it didn’t hold its own as a medium… Now people would go podcast first, it wouldn’t be this second thought.”

The show’s legacy emboldens an optimistic belief that a good enough idea will succeed, even without a huge celebrity name or financial backing. What MDWAP has achieved, for many, is the gold standard, but the trio insist that creators have to be in it for the right, authentic reasons (no matter how cheesy that sounds, Levine says). “This show couldn’t have happened in any other way than a podcast and probably even any other time,” Morton says. “It really was lightning in the bottle.”

The final episode of ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ is out now