“She roughly fondled Belinda’s tits and ass in the washing process with a long handled brush and pushed her, still naked, into a horsebox.”
This is one of many choice cuts from My Dad Wrote A Porno, the funniest thing to hit consumable media in donkey’s years.
You’ve probably heard the name – it’s hard to ignore anything with ‘porno’ in the title – but if you don’t know what’s what, then please, allow us.
My Dad Wrote A Porno is a podcast, now in it’s third season, in which Jamie Morton is joined by friends James Cooper and Radio 1’s Alice Levine, who listen to Jamie reading aloud from his father’s books of erotic literature, entitled Belinda Blinked, which he writes under the pen name Rocky Flintstone.
The books chronicle the sexy adventures of Belinda Blumenthal, a sales executive who takes a job at cookware giant Steele’s Pots and Pans. Closing deals in the pots and pans industry isn’t as simple as putting pen to paper; it takes a special touch to get the job done. In other words, she has to bonk all the clients.
As she sells her sexy wares, Belinda meets (and invariably has sex with) a host of fascinating characters, from duchesses to Russian oligarchs, while visiting such exotic locations as Texas, Amsterdam and Heathrow Airport.
The podcast has been a smash hit, dropping on Mondays to a rapturous fanbase, dubbed ‘Belinkers’, who download the podcast in their millions, along with a host of celebrity fans, who make midweek appearances on the show’s ‘Footnotes’ discussion episodes.
So what makes My Dad Wrote A Porno so popular? I can only speak from personal experience, but I have added My Dad Wrote A Porno to the illustrious list of Things That Nearly Caused Me To Die Because I Was Laughing So Hard, joining such luminaries as Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mind of Karl Pilkington.
Firstly, Rocky’s books are amazing. Amazing. As a writer, Rocky Flintstone has no regard for the standards of English: spelling, grammar, syntax, story structure, even basic punctuation – it’s all out the window. This either makes him a renegade artist or just someone who didn’t pay enough attention in English lessons at school.
Biology, too. His grasp of human anatomy is tenuous at best; the kind of impossible sex moves he employs in his books are as eye-watering as they are hilarious. As the series progresses, he learns more about the human body, yet seems ever more determined to contort it into a fleshy freak show.
Rocky has some of the most amazing metaphors in literature; the way he paints a picture through words is quite unparalleled. Consider: “Her tits hung freely, like pomegranates” and “[Her nipples] were now as large as the three inch rivets which had held the hull of the fateful Titanic together.”
You can’t deny you’ve got an image in your mind. Whether you actually want it there is another matter.
The stories contain some of the least sexy sex scenes ever put down in words. Every now and then, Alice and James have to remind Jamie that what he is reading came out of his father’s mind, through his fingers and into words. Once you hear the kind of fantasies that Jamie’s dad has dreamt up, you’ll wonder how he can even look him in the eye, let alone share a turkey sandwich with him (you’ll have to listen to figure out what that means).
Belinda Blinked would be perfectly fine as a book (a self-published e-book, to be precise, though it now exists in print) but the podcast elevates Flintstone’s badly-written smut to a higher level. The friendship between Jamie, Alice and James is key. As Jamie reads his dad’s erotica aloud, Jamie and Alice fill in for us, the audience.
Their reaction is usually somewhere between raucous laughter and riotous indignation. With the kind of liberties that Rocky takes with storytelling and the physical limitations of the human body, it’s good to have someone to say, “Stop. What is he talking about?”
Words cannot fully do My Dad Wrote A Porno justice, you’ll need to get your earphones in (for the love of god, make sure you’re listening in private) and dive headfirst into the world of Belinda Blumenthal. You might want to be sick, but you won’t regret it.
My Dad Wrote A Porno is available wherever you get your podcasts.
