My dad wrote a porno--and I turned it into a podcast
April 30, 2017 1:12 PM   Subscribe

On retirement, [Jamie Morton's] dad decided he was going to write a novel, along the lines of “50 Colours of Grey,” as he called it. When his son Jamie realized the draft chapter of Belinda Blinked that his dad had sent him was actually erotica, he decided to read bits of it out loud to friends at a Christmas lunch. This eventually evolved into the popular UK comedy podcast My Dad Wrote A Porno, where Jamie and his friends Alice Levine and James Cooper read a chapter a week and provide commentary. So far the trio have had over 18 million downloads on iTunes, hosted fellow fans and guest stars Elijah Wood and Star Wars' Daisy Ridley, and been featured in a live show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Later this year they will tour Australia and New Zealand.

Some listeners have expressed concern for Morton's dad, or "Rocky Flintstone" (his nom de plume). However, according to Morton, his father and his three sisters are enjoying the show. His mother, while less enthusiastic, supports her husband's right to be creative as long as he writes in the garden shed rather than the house.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl (21 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I will never, ever complain again about the way The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect made its way into the zeitgeist.
posted by Bringer Tom at 1:23 PM on April 30, 2017


Did someone say "write in the garden shed"?
posted by effbot at 1:25 PM on April 30, 2017 [5 favorites]


There's something loopily brilliant in Rocky Flinstone's use of language, from mangled metaphors to his shaky understanding of anatomy. I will never hear the word "lids" in the same way again.
posted by sgranade at 1:29 PM on April 30, 2017 [6 favorites]


At a time when DC comics has "reimagined" The Flintstones to contain awkward amounts of social commentary, I can't avoid thinking of "The Erotica of Rocky Flintstone" as part of a bigger metajoke.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:42 PM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


The hallowed tradition of writing in the garden shed
posted by infini at 1:42 PM on April 30, 2017


I will never hear the word "lids" in the same way again.

I'm also having trouble with "hose."
posted by BaffledWaffle at 2:34 PM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


I have loved this podcast for so long and NIPPLES LIKE RIVETS ON THE TITANIC
posted by Kitteh at 3:03 PM on April 30, 2017 [12 favorites]


"My dad writes pornography? What a strange expression. He creates erotica, if that's what you mean, Jane."
posted by w0mbat at 3:04 PM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


One of my favorite podcasts of all time.

And the annotated version of Belinda Blinked left me in tears, I laughed so hard.
posted by theBigRedKittyPurrs at 3:43 PM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wasn't there someone who found out late in life, or maybe after their father died, that he'd written a lot of porn under a pseudonym? And maybe he was also involved with science fiction as a writer or big-name fan or something? Could have sworn that I read about it on the blue.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:14 PM on April 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


"My Dad, the Pornographer" (2015).
posted by amk at 4:38 PM on April 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


.....It is time to share with those who don't know about it -

Over on Livejournal, in a community I once followed, someone posted a story about a friend who had just moved into a new house and they were helping them move in. During the move, they were cleaning out some rubbish in the basement which the previous owner had left behind. And found a box of five three-ring binders - each of which contained a full reams' worth of porn. They posted a few selections from the Three Ring Binder archives - here's their master post with links to them all.

They ultimately only shared nine such stories. But all of them had similar details:

* French characters with distinctly un-French names
* Threesomes
* Completely nonsensical metaphors about, and general confusion about, human anatomy (a sampling: "Socrates had only just gotten up and his foreskin hadn't been pulled back properly yet")

We BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGGED them to do a web site with this all. I even offered to transcribe things. but they disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived, leaving us with only these stories.

Enjoy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:17 PM on April 30, 2017 [11 favorites]


Man, I typically don't find stuff like this funny, but oh my gawd that LJ link! I wonder if the 3 ring binder stories were intentional parody... wow.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:49 PM on April 30, 2017


I wrote a romance novel last year, which I hope will actually be published by one of the ebook-first romance publishers. My kids have been very excited and encouraging, and my 13-year-old asked me one day when he could read it.

Me: "As soon as you're comfortable reading explicit sex scenes written by your mother."

13-year-old: "So, never, then."
posted by Orlop at 7:08 PM on April 30, 2017 [21 favorites]


I will never, ever complain again about the way The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect made its way into the zeitgeist.
How did it make its way into the zeitgeist? Speaking as a fan (even have the hard copy!)
posted by flippant at 7:45 PM on April 30, 2017


I never thought I would come to crave new episodes of this show, but it's the show we save to listen together when we're laying in the hot tub at night (we have a hot tub, he has arthritis, it's several nights a week) but it is so absurd, so truly absurdly genuinely absurd - the cervix-grabbing, the blue semen, the alien penis transplant - that floating in the ether only trying to comprehend it is really the only way to take it in. We are currently bereft because You Must Remember This has ended and My Dad Wrote A Porno has not started yet.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:59 PM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


How did it make its way into the zeitgeist?

Spent eight years in the closet novel drawer. Got drawn out into the open by kuro5hin, which was not an inherently bad thing but then kuro5hin. Almost a decade thinking K5 would be a great venue and intro for it, but then meh. Fortunately people keep referring to it (that "referrers" thing in the web logs) and it just refuses to die. And every once in awhile I get an email from someone who tells me how it changed their life and made them make significant life choices like entering a graduate AI program or becoming a *cough* brilliant hacker. And those things freak me out a little bit. I didn't want to reach into your little child's life and make him mini-localroger. But words are far more powerful than we realize, and stories have a way of being real to a certain degree even when they are total fantasy. Which might be why we tell them; to this day I am not quite sure why I wrote MOPI. It's more like a thing that happened to me than like a thing that I did. But if I had it to do over again, I can say that I would write it again, because I fucking love that story.
posted by Bringer Tom at 8:12 PM on April 30, 2017 [3 favorites]


Peter Rouse and Belinda Blumenthal..... a love story for the 21st century
posted by JenThePro at 9:04 AM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


I love this podcast so much. I'm almost to the point where I can't listen to it while I'm driving lest I drive off the road from laughing so hard.

So many things, Belinda's wet blouses, Peter Rouse's arcane symbols, LIDS!, grabbing of cervixes, Jamie's American accents, James channeling Rocky, Alice's complete flabbergasted "what the hells?!"
posted by Constant Reader at 11:01 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


the blue semen

I have just reached this point, and: it didn't disappoint. Oh God. SKIN FLAKES.

The one thing I do wish is that they'd record some new adverts; I am so so sick of hearing that perky "get the oven on" BlueApron promo.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:13 PM on May 18, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's a fun story but there are many (old) people writing erotic stories and publishing it online, who in every day life are/were nurses, librarians, lawyers, etc.
posted by NotSam at 7:41 AM on May 26, 2017


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