Why podcasts are making a big noise
WHAT would you do if you discovered your dad had written a porno? Make a podcast, of course. It’s just one of the naughty — and nice — podcasts that are taking the world by storm.
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FIRST, thanks. Thank you for taking time out of your busy podcast listening schedule to read the written word.
There’s a good chance the podcast you’re hooked on is mentioned in these pages. My Dad Wrote a Porno might be your current fave.
It’s a UK podcast based around a book — although graphic novel fits just as well — titled Belinda Blinked, written by Jamie Morton’s father, under the nom de plume Rocky Flintstone.
His dad (whose real name is kept secret) decided to name the heroine Belinda Blumenthal and make her a pots and pans sales director. Because that screams sex.
“I read it and immediately I knew it was solid gold s---,” 30-year-old Morton says.
My Dad Wrote a Porno is the No. 1 podcast in Australia. Adele is a fan and actors Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings) and Daisy Ridley (Star Wars) have even come around to record with Morton and his uni mates, the BBC’s Alice Levine and James Cooper.
“We launched Chapter 3 on Monday and had 280,000 downloads in one day,” Morton says.
The perky chap was in Melbourne last week before the ribald trio return in August to “perform” the podcast live.
Launching in 2015, the dirty, deliberately derpy series has been a runaway train. The podcast has 55 million downloads, and has become the No. 1 podcast worldwide.
A live Melbourne show by the co-creator of the wildly popular podcast S-Town, which explores poverty, prejudice and mental illness in small-town America, sold out in 24 hours.
The Wheeler Centre, which is presenting Brian Reed’s Mysteries, Mazes and the Making of S-Town show responded to the overwhelming demand this week, announcing a second show at the Athenaeum Theatre next month.
S-Town, from the makers of Serial, was downloaded 10 million times in the four days after its March release, setting a record.
Tom Hawking, Aussie expat, Flavorwire editor-in-chief in New York and cultural commentator, says he believes podcasts have become so popular because they fill a void.
“I haven’t actually been a big podcast listener until recently, when my girlfriend started playing the ones out loud she listens to — and she listens to a lot — instead of just listening with headphones,” Hawking says.
“We sit and listen to them together, and it’s really lovely, actually. It reminds me of being a kid, listening to the radio with my parents.
“I think they’ve become a cultural phenomenon for exactly this reason — they fill the role that radio programs used to play. Of course, there are cities like Melbourne where we’re lucky enough to have excellent radio stations, but in places that don’t, podcasts are a godsend, and either way, they’re a lot more convenient — you can download and listen whenever you want.”
He says he’s enjoying listening to Radiolab — “science-y nerd-dom, very much up my alley” — along with This American Life.
“Zach Lowe’s The Lowe Post is a must for basketball fans. Reply All is great for internet culture, both for those of us who have to live inside it every day and those lucky enough to watch in bemusement from without.”
Australia’s early adopters of podcasting were stand-up comedians Karl Chandler and Tommy Dassalo, who began The Little Dum Dum Club in 2010, which stars different guest comedians every week.
Past guests include Wil Anderson, Anne Edmonds, Dilruk Jayasinha, John Safran, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Hannibal Buress and Yumi Stynes.
The podcast is attracting more than 50,000 listeners per episode, mostly from Australia.
The crew does almost 20 live shows a year.
“We’ve just finished two live shows on the Thailand island of Koh Samui. We have zero fans in Koh Samui,” Chandler says. “We set up our own ‘podcast festival’, in which we were the only podcast and 100 listeners from around the world flew over for it.
“We regularly tour Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth though. Our shows have a bit of a reputation for being very loose and fun, especially what we call ‘The DrunkCast’, which is an unrecorded podcast where, surprise, we get very drunk, as does the crowd, and we do and say a lot of things we couldn’t do normally.”
Chandler says the convenience of podcasts is responsible for the recent popularity.
“We have a lot of listeners who enjoy the fact they can save our episodes up and use them on a long-distance trip, or on the way to work, or at the gym. And like a show on Netflix, they can binge listen to us. We have 350 episodes now, and we get new listeners who listen to them all in a matter of weeks.”
Chandler, who lists Comedy Bang Bang and Wil Anderson’s TOFOP (an acronym for Thirty Odd Foot Of Pod) as his go-to podcasts, says The Little Dum Dum Club is like eavesdropping on what comedians are really like backstage.
Morton’s go-to podcast is from someone who worked closely with his new BFF, Michael Sheen, on 30 Rock: “Alec Baldwin does an interview podcast titled Here’s The Thing. They talk about their process (faux American accent). I haven’t listened to Serial. Yet. It’s an exciting time to be involved in this medium.”
In Melbourne last week, Morton reminisced about the origin of My Dad Wrote A Porno.
“He took me to one side at my sister’s birthday and said, ‘Look, I’ve been writing a book.’ I thought it was genuinely the best thing I’d ever heard,” Morton says.
“My dad is a retired builder, not a writer. He sent me the first few chapters of Belinda Blinked. Literally the first line is ‘I’m going to have to ask you to remove your jacket and silk blouse.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no (downcast), my dad’s written porn’,” he says.
Surely his father told him it was, um, material of an erotic nature?
“No. He gave no warning that it was porn.
“I read it and immediately took it down to the pub and read it to my friends and they started piling on with the comments. That’s where the podcast took shape.”
Morton is a filmmaker, writer “and content creator”. He’d never made a podcast before.
“But anyone can make them and they’re really cheap to make. Podcasting is more labour-intensive than I ever thought it would be. We all still have day jobs. People can pretend they’re listening to music when they’re actually listening to porn.”
For the uninitiated, Jamie, James and Alice read a line or two of the “attempted sex novel”, then step back and unpack it, making sure they drink whenever actual sex takes place as Belinda finds herself climbing the corporate ladder by clawing down her tights.
“He calls someone’s penis ‘the flesh of mankind’. That’s frightening. My all-time favourite is when he describes some nipples as the three-inch rivets that held the Titanic together. That is poetry. Titanic nipples, really? Loads of people died, Dad. And it sank.
“Michael Sheen (30 Rock) compared my dad to Shakespeare, (imitates his voice) ‘I’m a classically trained actor and your dad is Shakespeare-esque.’ We all said he should stop encouraging him, it’s terrible,” he says with a chuckle.
“All these celebrities geek out listening to the show then want to come on to the show and geek out with us and bring bottles of wine.
“It’s still a ramshackle operation, we still record it around the table at my house.”
If you’re finding this dad-mockery a bit harsh, please stop. He’s loving it.
“He’s totally in on the joke. As much as it is gross and talking about sex, it’s just two of my best mates talking about my dad. They love my dad. And the reason it’s become popular isn’t because of the sex, it’s the dynamic between the three of us and the tone we’ve managed to create. It helps that the grammar’s wrong and he can’t even really spell,” he says.
Quite often Alice gets quite fired up. “Come on, where’s the sex? There it is, drink,” is her paraphrased catchphrase.
Meanwhile, James is gay and, ironically, plays the straight man.
“The scale of the audience has blown us away. We knew we’d made something funny but you never know with comedy what will transcend,” Morton says.
Transcend it has, earning more than 700-plus five-star reviews from listeners, all with very little support from a certain arm of Apple.
“iTunes is an antiquated piece of software in a way. Podcasts are free as a rule. And because we have Porno in the title they pretend we don’t exist. So we’re an underground guerilla hit, we have the listenership without the promotion. We work with a Swedish company, Acast, and they find us sponsors to work with.”
iTunes has wised up now, declaring on their Podcasts home page, “They’re back,” with buxom-fonted acronym MDWAP.
Morton and his mates will be back here in August to do a live reading of Belinda Blinked.
“We wanted to make it different to the normal podcast. You know when your parents email you and it’s always a bit embarrassing? My dad emails me s--- a few times per day. Then I went back through all of his emails for ideas and he’d sent me a whole other chapter.
“And so we basically read that chapter and have visual elements and re-enactments and audience participation. It’s a proper show ... and it’s gone down insanely, brilliantly well.”
And it turns out, My Dad Wrote a Porno has helped people through tough times.
“We’ve had loads of comments on our Facebook, etc. It ranges from people saying it’s helped them with depression and bereavement to someone who said it helped them lose their virginity. It wasn’t to the podcast, they made that very clear. Basically it was this couple who had been together for a while and they’d never had sex, they kept putting it off.
“Having sex with someone for the first time is daunting and they listened to the podcast and realised it isn’t that scary — it should be fun. Then they got in touch with me and said, ‘We’ve finally done it, thank you,’ and we were all so proud.
“We said, ‘We hope you name the baby Jamie James Alice or Belinda or even Rocky.
“In the live show we have to find your porno pen-name. We have heaps of ’80s macho action hero names and then different cartoon characters as the surname so, like, Terminator Jetson.”
But what about that pen-name Rocky Flintstone? Where did that come from?
Morton shrugs: “I’ve never asked actually.”
Outrageous. We send word back to the UK that we need the scoop. And fast.
Right before deadline, this missive comes back via a scrappy text from his dad:
“Our pal in Brazil has a dog called Rocky and between him and Rocky in the Rockford Files, well you’ve got it. As for Flintstone as u know my Degree is in Geology and a Flintstone is a thing ... white cliffs of Dover ... but I also emphasize (sic) with Fred in the very last sequence when he’s hammering at the door to get Wilma to let him into the house because he’s done something terrible … WIIIIILLLLLMMMMMAAAAA!”
MY DAD WROTE A PORNO LIVE
Hamer Hall, Aug 17, $69.90, artscentremelbourne.com.au; Athenaeum Theatre, Collins St, city, Aug 18, $69.90, ticketek.com.au
BRIAN REED: MYSTERIES, MAZES AND THE MAKING OF S-TOWN
Athenaeum Theatre, Collins St, city, Jul 26, $25/$15. wheelercentre.com
HERE’S A BEGINNER’S GUIDE
The pioneering podcast
This American Life
For Zeitgeist internet engagement
Reply All
For true crime
Serial (and now S-Town)
For what everyone’s talking about
The War on Waste
For feeling smart
Stuff You Should Know
For scientific developments
Radiolab
For fictional short stories
The New Yorker
For creepy fiction
Limetown
For international comedians
WTF with Marc Maron
For Oz comedy in-jokes
The Little Dum Dum Club
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