My Dad Wrote A Porno: Hit podcast series comes to an end
- Published
"All bad porn must come to an end," opens the finale of My Dad Wrote A Porno.
And it has.
After seven years, six series and two sell-out tours, the hit British comedy podcast of 430m downloads has finished.
But the hosts have hinted that it's not the last fans will hear of protagonist Belinda Blumenthal, sales executive at Steeles Pots and Pans, as she tries to make it in the cut-throat and debauched industry.
Like many memorable and high-profile series, the podcast ends on somewhat of a cliff-hanger, with Belinkers - as fans are known - wondering what's next for Belinda, as she prepares to take over cookware rivals Bisch-Herstellung, poaching her Glee Team friends to work for her, and with the trio looking to move to East Berlin to follow their dreams.
While host Jamie Morton will no longer read chapters of his dad's questionable erotica to his friends James Cooper and Alice Levine, with the trio then analysing the prose while often crying with laughter, aficionados should "keep their eyes peeled", the friends have said, although they remain tight-lipped on any further details.
And if fans need a fix before then, the author of the series - who writes under the "nom-de-porn" Rocky Flintstone - has pledged to keep on churning out more of his niche works.
Filled with inconsistencies, typos, and incorrect labelling of the female anatomy, the show has been such a hit that it has spawned two sold-out world tours, at venues such as the Sydney Opera House and Radio City Music Hall in New York.
The live shows were also turned into a comedy special on US channel HBO and the Footnotes spin-off episodes have featured an unending roster of A-list stars.
While the podcasts have propelled Morton, Cooper and Levine on to the international stage, the brain behind the books had remained out of the limelight.
Yet in the final Footnotes episode, he graced the airwaves, explaining just where he gets the inspiration for the increasingly outlandish plot and revealing that he actually does proof-read his work, much to the amazement of the hosts, who'd spent a large chunk of the previous episode laughing over typos such as "frying my brian".
While MDWAP has been a huge success, speaking to BBC News last month, Morton, Levine and Cooper said the "biggest reward" of the show had been the community it has created.
"People have said it helped with their mental health and got them through difficult periods," said Cooper, and the penultimate Footnotes episode featured messages from listeners thanking the podcast for often getting them through the "worst year" of their lives.
While the episodes are normally light-hearted hour-long chunks of hilarity based on the "sordid pages" of Rocky's writing, the trio ended the finale with a list of thanks to all those who had made it possible, and Morton praising his co-hosts, telling them: "There's nobody on the planet I would rather have read my dad's porn with than you two."
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