After a stellar eight years, My Dad Wrote A Porno has accumulated massive success with over 400m downloads, interviews with celebrities like Lin Manuel Miranda and Dame Emma Thompson, two sold-out world tours of the live show, an HBO comedy special…. and their very-own fandom at NASA listening all the way from space; but now the team has decided it’s time to wrap it all up and move on.
In this exclusive industry podcast interview with PodPod, co-hosts Jamie Morton, Alice Levine and James Cooper sat down with Rhianna Dhillon and Reem Makari to reflect on their many successes and accomplishments over the course of their six-season run, how the podcasting industry has transformed since they first started eight years ago… and what the future might hold for Belinda Blinked.
Key takeaways
You need to be all in and prepare ahead
Levine: “We need a logo, we need music, we need a website, we need handles on all social media, we need all of that in place before we even get going. We need a sort of plan of attack: if we think this is a good enough idea to make it, then we think it's a good enough idea to actually put our weight behind it.”
Morton: “Just really put everything [such as intelletcual property ownership rights] in place. If nothing happens, nothing happens, then that's fine. But if something does happen and it becomes big, getting all of that stuff sorted early just saves a load of time.”
Don’t overthink it and do what works
Morton: “The first episode was only ever supposed to be a pilot, it was never meant to be released actually… And then I was editing it and it became abundantly clear that you couldn't recapture this, this kind of feeling of Alice and James hearing this material for the first time on mic. So I was like, guys, it sounds like sh*t, but we're gonna have to use it.”
Enjoy the process of creating the show
Cooper: “I think what keeps us going with it is that kind of creative drive… to make something great and to make something that has an audience no matter how big or small. We just get so excited about coming up with ideas and getting together to plan the live show or even thinking about this finale and how we were gonna do it… it's all just like fun stuff to us.”
Footnotes
My Dad Wrote A Porno HBO comedy special
MDWAP Episode - Lin Manuel Miranda
My Dad Wrote A Porno to end, after globally successful six-season run
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