“A Big Chunk Of My Time Is Dedicated To Dad Porn”: Behind The Scenes Of ‘My Dad Wrote A Porno’
We talked to Jamie Morton, host of the hit podcast and son of the infamous erotica author.
The idea of my dad writing an erotic novel is as awful as the dream I had last night where Donald Trump was in a singlet, leering over me in my grandparents’ house for some reason.
I have a visceral reaction to the thought of both of those things; that reaction mainly consisting of face-scrunching, bile-creeping-up-your-throat disgust. But for Jamie Morton, this nightmare became his reality when his dad decided to pen a novel — an erotic one. At least Jamie was able to turn it into something else: a podcast that’s brought joy and disgust to millions of people worldwide.
My Dad Wrote A Porno features Morton with two of his best pals, Alice and James, as they work through a chapter of his dad’s erotic novel, Belinda Blinked, each week. Jamie is at the helm, reading his dad’s filthy words, and Alice and James react to the fact this man that they know, the father of their mate, writes pornography which references the engineering of the Titanic. (An extract for newbies: “Her nipples hardened with her feeling and they were now as large as the three-inch rivets which had held the hull of the fateful Titanic together.”)
Despite the inherent mockery, the podcast is remarkably kind and loving; the successes of the show are shared and enjoyed by Morton’s dad, Rocky Flinstone. Ahead of season three of My Dad Wrote A Porno (episode one is out now!), we had a chance to talk about pen names, the best Rocky Flinstone lines, and the unexpected joy in dad-written erotica with the show’s creator.
Junkee: So, why podcasting? Does My Dad Wrote A Porno now take up all your time?
Jamie Morton: Increasingly it’s taking up all of my time, yeah! But no, it isn’t my main job really and we kind of never wanted to make it our proper jobs. We really enjoy it as a side-project and we felt that if we started to have to rely on it too much for paying rent it would kind of lose a bit of its appeal.
I’m a director and a writer in the UK normally, and I’m still doing bits of that but, to be honest with you, increasingly less and less. The show is growing and growing and we’re now releasing series three. It’s ratcheting up again so the next big chunk of time will all be dedicated to dad porn.
I used to work for a writers’ festival, and we held a writing competition. A lot of entries came from retirees, I think they have time to reflect on their life and write about it and the things they’ve seen. But would you ever in a million years have expected your dad to do this, and come out with erotica?
Honestly? Never. I don’t think you could ever prepare yourself for your parents to start writing erotica. He’s always been a little bit crazy, to be fair, he’s always very much been the centre of attention, and a practical joker. I never would have thought he had the discipline to write anything to be honest, let alone write something so racy, and then write it so badly. The layers of improbability are so huge.
I’m a big fan and I can still say, it’s… so bad.
It really is, isn’t it? It’s awful! We aren’t joking, it’s terrible.
At dinner the other night my dad was explaining to my family and I what he thought phone sex was, like, people using FaceTime and the like, and it was clear he had no idea what he was talking about. It’s a bit like that with My Dad Wrote a Porno, Rocky comes out with these things and it’s– it’s this mix of incredibly racy and that dad-misunderstanding of how things work?
Yeah, exactly. It’s like they’ve heard something, and then they’ve taken that little grain of knowledge and created their own narrative of what that means. Like when [Rocky Flinstone] was saying about the 69 being the shape of a naked lady and I’m like… no, where have you even got that from? I mean, bless you. In a way it’s kind of comforting that he doesn’t really get a lot of stuff? At least he hasn’t been playing away for the past 20 years.
I don’t think that it has any relation to my parents in any way, unless my mum is some kind of Picasso drawing.
Well for me, if my dad had written this, my first instinct would be to put it down and not think too hard about what my dad and maybe my mum had gotten up to.
That’s the omnipresent cloud over this whole project. But because it’s so badly written, and not even just the fact that he has trouble with grammar and spelling, but just the sex in it is so bad. I really don’t think that it has any relation to my parents in any way. Unless my mum is some kind of Picasso drawing, you know? There aren’t “vaginal lids” and breasts don’t “hang like pomegranates”. That’s not a thing! So I feel kind of ok going into it because it’s just so absurd and ludicrous that it can’t possibly be based in anything real.
Speaking of “vaginal lids”, do you have a favourite line or chapter from Belinda Blinked? Mine is definitely the Titanic nipples one.
I think that might be mine as well, you know? It’s just so bizarre. It just keeps going, as an anecdote… it’s not just the Titanic, it’s the “fateful Titanic”.
Were James and Alice a conscious pick to do this project with you?
They were two of the friends I first read it to, they were involved in the critiquing of it from very early on, but in terms of getting them on the podcast, they are just two of the funniest people I know. I was like, I need to have some big hitters to combat this stuff with me. And we’ve also always made stuff together; we’ve made sketches and web series and written some stuff ever since university. They just felt like the natural fit. I feel so comfortable with them, I’ve known them for nearly 15 years so it was something I wasn’t going to feel too embarrassed reading to them.
It was a little bit intimidating to begin with, because I didn’t know what was going to be coming next in the book because I don’t read ahead of time, so I didn’t want to do it with people I didn’t know very well, and have to be like “um, can we just… stop here because it’s getting a bit weird.”
[Alice and James] also know my parents, which helped a lot as well, because that was the other really important part of the project. I wanted it to have my parents’ blessing, and my wider family too actually, so that everyone was completely up for it and ok with us doing it. Having James and Alice involved made it feel a little bit more like a safe environment for everyone.
Rocky said “Oh my god that’s brilliant, that’s fantastic, do it! Now, what’s a podcast?”
It is tricky as a writer of any kind — whether it be writing books like your dad, or writing for TV or film like yourself — to borrow from your own life. How important was it for you to have your parents blessing before it went ahead?
It was everything. I would never have done it without being completely upfront and honest with them. It was quite funny actually, I said “Dad I’m thinking of making this into a podcast”, and he was like “Oh my god that’s brilliant, that’s fantastic, do it! Now, what’s a podcast?”
So then I explained to him what a podcast was and I played my whole family the first episode together so that we all could see the tone of it, and what it was about, and everyone was really cool about it actually. We are quite a close family, and we’ve all got a bit of crazy in us and I think everyone was up for it being this kind of family in-joke, that has obviously become bigger and bigger and bigger.
I think that’s probably part of its success — that it’s not mean-spirited. It’s so warm, and even though it’s so gross, you’ve had people write in being really grateful for dissolving their nerves around sex. It shows how it’s kind of funny and weird for everyone.
Was that an unexpected part of the podcast — this sort of reflection on your relationship with your dad and your family, and people’s relationship to sex?
Certainly, we went into it being very clear that we didn’t want it to be cruel in anyway. I love my dad, and I actually think it’s great that he’s written these books! Jokes aside, I think anyone who actually writes something and creates something should be given all the props in the world.
But yeah, that whole other side to it and how it’s caught on and the listeners relationship to the podcast is something we never really could have anticipated. People have, as you say, used it to lose their virginity, people have used it as their birthing soundtrack to distract them from the pain, we’ve had some amazing messages from people dealing with bereavement and depression and the podcast helping them through tough times. All of that has been a really, really rewarding side effect of making this show that we’ve been proud of from the beginning. But we never, ever, imagined that it would catch on in that way.
I think people do reassess their own family dynamics through the show, in a way. It kind of lifts the lid on how the dynamic of the relationship with your parents shifts when you become an adult. That’s sometimes quite a difficult progression to navigate. They’re no longer your parents in the traditional sense; they’re no longer providing for you and you’re not under their roof, and they do become more of your friend. I think seeing my parents as human beings has been a really interesting thing for me.
To quickly wrap up — a friend said to me that Rocky Flinstone is such a ridiculous pseudonym, and he asked me to ask you what yours would be, and if you’d consider Jamie Jetson?
Jamie Jetson! That’s amazing. Oh my god I’m going to steal that.
You know I probably should have had a pseudonym throughout this process! I never thought that it would ever be popular enough to warrant one, and people have often asked me — are you going to be Jamie Flinstone, and I’m like, I’m still very much the Emilio Estevez of the Sheen dynasty. Dad can take the Flinstone, but I might keep Morton. But maybe Jetson.
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My Dad Wrote a Porno is touring Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth later this year. More info here. The first episode of the show’s third season is online now:
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Rebecca Varcoe is a writer and events producer from Melbourne. She makes print humour journal Funny Ha Ha and writes about all kinds of things for a few places online.