I really never want to be pigeonholed,” grumbles Alice Levine. Which is understandable: she’s a serious presenter, documentarian and journalist — the archetypal millennial slashie. She has hosted Big Brother’s Bit on the Side, been a Radio 1 presenter, appeared on game shows and run a supper club in Clapton.
But what Levine is best known for, she admits, is co-presenting the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno, with Jamie Morton, the aforementioned dad’s son, and James Cooper. “Is that disappointing? Is that embarrassing? Is that fantastic? It’s not clear, is it?” she says.
With more than 150 million downloads, a sellout world tour and fans like Emma Thompson, Daisy Ridley, Nicholas Hoult and Michael Sheen, My Dad Wrote a Porno blazed a trail for the overshare zeitgeist, detailing the smutty-but-sweet misadventures of Belinda as written by Jamie’s father “Rocky” (a nom de plume). The formula was simple: Morton discovered the existence of his dad’s pet project — “sexy pamphlets”, says Levine — and was horrified, but his friends recognised its comic potential.
And lo, so did everyone else. Next Saturday, HBO will air a comedy special of the show which features a “lost chapter” from one of the books, “which, if you know about Rocky’s books, is really saying something”, says Levine. “They’re bilge. So it’s pretty incredible that he’s even got a filter of some variety. [For HBO] I would say this is their debut of porn, but that’s pretty much Game of Thrones, let’s be honest.” She describes it as sex education. In the live show, which was at the Royal Albert Hall last year, she dons a lab coat, grabs a blackboard and provides a detailed illustration of the female anatomy, labelled. It always gets a standing ovation. “There is a point when someone grabs someone’s cervix in Rocky’s book ... he definitely thinks the female reproductive system is a bag of items you can just jumble up. He thinks they all move around, and the names can be used interchangeably. But you wouldn’t believe the number of people who have said they’ve learned something.” If it’s taking the taboo out of talking about sex, then great, she says. “We had this amazing letter from somebody who said she and her other half were having difficulty talking about losing her virginity, and it was a really weird and uncomfortable conversation, but they listened to the podcast and just talked. That’s great. We were all quite prudish when we started, we really did not overshare. But it does feel that when you’re laughing about something you can talk about it more. It’s not a heavy environment.” The oversharing has other advantages.
She’s the new brand ambassador of chocolatier Lily O’Brien’s, because their current campaign is “all about sharing wisely — which basically means free chocolate when I want it”. But work isn’t all perks. In Sleeping With the Far Right on Channel 4 she stayed in the Southport home of Jack Sen, a man who was too extreme for Ukip. “There’s a moment when we’re on his sofa with the Union Jack bedspread draped over his settee, and we’d just had this really heated moment, and I said this was the most uncomfortable moment of my life. He just turned to me and said, ‘You’ve had a very sheltered life, then.’” Wasn’t there a “no platforming” issue here? It’s easy to reel off institutions given a public lashing for indulging those with extreme views: Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon’s interview at the New Yorker Festival was cancelled; psychologist Jordan Peterson’s offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge was rescinded. “We thought a lot and talked a lot about giving those views a platform and giving them oxygen. I don’t think we did that. I don’t think we just let somebody reel off their rhetoric or well-rehearsed arguments, or their damaging opinions, or their harmful thoughts. It was a different film to the ones I’d seen before THE LISTENER Blackout 30 mins on those subjects, and tracing the genesis of that thinking is really helpful.” Levine, 32, also hosted dystopian reality TV series The Circle on Channel 4, in which contestants tried to dupe others with fake online profiles. “It did start some really interesting conversations about how we present ourselves online,” she says. “I spend five hours, 32 minutes a day on my phone. It’s actually disgusting. And you don’t feel it. That’s the most worrying part of the whole thing.” Ultimately, her job involves taking on every subject with just a little bit of levity: “You can have really big conversations and make them palatable when you buff off the corners a bit with some humour”.
Alice Levine is a brand ambassador for luxury chocolatier Lily O’Brien’s
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