Jamie Morton, creator and co-host In 2015, my dad took me aside at a family gathering and said: “I’m writing a book.” He didn’t say what it was about, but a month later he emailed it to me asking for my feedback. When I realised what it was, a pornographic novel, I had to share it with my friends – if only to purge the shame from my body. Belinda Blinked, written and self-published under the pen name Rocky Flintstone, was about a salesgirl and her sexual exploits. If anyone’s dad was going to do this kind of thing, it was mine. He’s like a mad Irish professor. By the time he told me about his writing, he was already on the third book in the series. Alice Levine and James Cooper are my best mates from uni and we were all working in TV at the time. Alice found the idea of the book hilarious and wanted to do something with it. Coming up with the podcast – in which I read my dad’s book to them and we discuss it – was a process of trial and error. We wanted it to be funny but not snarky. The day after we released the first episode, we were 96th in the iTunes podcast charts. I was naive and thought that was probably because there were only 100 podcasts, but actually we had found an audience quickly. Six years on, we’ve had huge guests on our “footnotes” spin-off series, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton, and Dan Levy from Schitt’s Creek. We’ve also done live shows: download figures are one thing, but when you’re in a room with 3,000 people who listen to your show, that’s amazing. The fans know Dad’s writing better than any of us – we forget things all the time. Selling out the Sydney Opera House was a surreal experience. It’s such an intimate show, so it’s an odd kind of paradox. Dad loves coming on tour with us, but back at home he takes the Rocky hat off and goes back to being a dad to three other kids. He was a builder from Northern Ireland – he didn’t have any aspirations to be in the media, so to do something in his 60s that people love so much has been amazing. Watching people fall in love with him has been the nicest thing about it. Alice Levine, co-host Jamie’s dad is a real wind-up merchant. He’s just a prankster. And although his writing wasn’t intended as a joke, I suppose it is the ultimate prank on all of us. I was immediately smitten by the Belinda Blinked books. It just made me guffaw that this man in his 60s had written stuff he thought was sexy that was also intended to help young businesspeople. It seemed such an unusual hybrid. The way it was written made me laugh so much: at one point, he had obviously got bored and just started writing in bullet points. And phrases like “labial pinkness” – we always thought that sounded like a Farrow & Ball paint shade. In the first chapter, there’s a line about vaginal lids. We presumed he meant lips, but who knows? We wanted the podcast to feel inclusive, not like it was us having a lot of fun and the listener a Dickensian street urchin at the window looking in. The next challenge was bringing in our celebrity fans without shattering the dynamic we had built. We did the Emma Thompson episode at her house, which was a brilliant discussion about consent and sex in general. I’ve done a lot of six-minutes-in-a-hotel-room press junkets, so it’s a completely different experience to sit down and have dinner with somebody. Belinda Blinked certainly wasn’t written with any consideration of woke credentials, but actually it sends up the male gaze, as well as the ideas and formulations you see in bog-standard pornography. I think Jamie’s dad has created amazing characters. Although they are sometimes shallow, you genuinely want to spend time in their world. James Cooper, co-host I’ll never forget Jamie reading the book to us in the pub. We didn’t let him get through a sentence without laughing. The writing was hilarious: there’s a character in chapter two called Bella, but his dad forgets her name and she becomes Donna. And there’s a lot of imagery you would never want a parent to use. Jamie stupidly forwarded us the chapters and we started spreading them around the town. When other friends enjoyed it and wanted the whole book, we started to think: “Maybe we’re on to something here.” We liked the idea of a podcast, so we grabbed some dictaphones and sat around a table. Jamie edited the episode and played it to his family, to make sure his dad was on board. His mum couldn’t stay in the room, but everyone else was falling about laughing. It got a following pretty quickly, but episode three was a turning point. Elijah Wood tweeted about it and we ended up having him on. It has certainly gone beyond any of our expectations. The HBO special was absolutely nuts. During filming, we were just looking at each other thinking: “How has shit porn got us to this?”