Work Text:
“Do you smoke?”
I’m sat in the home of Aled Last, who’s just opened the window of his flat. It’s a rare sunny day here in London, but the agonizing heat of August hasn’t quite sunk in yet, making it rather comfortable in Last’s (relatively) new home. I decline the cigarette and he sighs. “I’m not supposed to. My partner would kill me if he knew.” He laughs, and gestures to my recorder lying on the coffee table. “I guess he will, though. Nice knowing you all.” It’s been one year since the viral podcast sensation Universe City ended, and for the first time, its notoriously private creator has agreed to discuss the project, his life, and what’s next for the biggest name in audio drama.
Despite the boxes of someone still settling, this flat is marked with the presence of Last’s mythic alter ego from Universe City, Radio Silence. Here in the living room, psychedelic art prints and posters line the walls with polaroids and photo booth strips of Last and his friends filling in the gaps. A green velvet sectional commandeers the far corner, and his bookshelves are overflowing. The tables are dotted with baubles; a set of leaf-shaped coasters, a Saturn-themed ashtray, a cleaned-out jam jar filled with colored pens and markers next to a beat to hell Moleskine notebook. A beautiful acoustic Les Paul guitar sits on a stand next to the sofa. Most notably, the ceiling is completely painted over, depicting a sea of stars against a swirling purple and blue night sky. It simultaneously feels like a work in progress, and yet deeply lived in.
And Last seems quite at home here. He perches on the deep window sill, taking care to blow each puff outside. His wispy blonde hair is long enough to be pulled back into a bun, and the ends (which are known to frequently change color) are a faded teal green. Instead of, say, a purple pinstripe suit with matching bolo tie, or a cartoonishly chunky sweater, or a boiler suit with a ladybird pattern, all of which he’s worn at brief public appearances, Last has opted today for sweats and a thin lilac t-shirt, which shows off his arm tattoos - a sleeve depicting a city skyline fading into space on the right, and a smattering of doodles on the left. “This one’s my favorite,” he says when I ask for a closer look, pointing at what appears to be a 1990s-style personal computer, with a simple frowning emoticon on the screen. “My best friend has the same one.”
Before asking if “anyone is listening,” Aled Ethan Last had humble beginnings. He grew up in Truham, Kent, a town prior to his rise to fame that was best known for producing a winter olympian and a couple semi-pro rugby players. It’s the perfect backdrop for a teen boy to find solace in a fantasy world. Last explains, “Nothing exciting happened there, if you don’t count that fire at the girls’ school down the road from mine. And I was obsessed with making up stories in my head. The character of Radio actually came from an A-Level Literature prompt, where we were told to write a letter from someone asking for help. I’d been watching old episodes of The X Files, Doctor Who, and The Twilight Zone for weeks on end… and my sister had just left home. Anyway, it was the perfect storm to dream up Radio and the world of Universe City.”
Fans of Universe City know the rest by now - the show slowly becomes a sleeper hit on YouTube, growing a fandom on Tumblr and Twitter rivaled only by network television, with Last staying anonymous for several years, until he was thrust into the spotlight against his wishes. “I’ve made my peace with it,” Last sighs as he stubs out his cigarette. With Sufjan Stevens playing softly from his phone, he grabs a nearby Rubik’s Cube and starts absentmindedly twisting it as he sits cross-legged on the opposite end of the sofa. “Everything felt really out of my control at that time, and the show was sort of the one thing that was totally mine. Like, no matter what was happening in real life, I could still be Radio. Once everyone knew it was me, I couldn’t hide in the City anymore.” Last cites other celebrities who hit their breaking point as a point of comparison: “When I left for uni, I couldn’t stop thinking about, like, Britney Spears or Princess Di. It’s kind of ridiculous to say out loud, because who am I compared to them, but really. These people were hounded by photographers to such an extreme, that it literally killed one of them. And it was happening to me, too, on a niche level. God, this sounds so vain. I remember someone had taken a photo of me crossing campus and when I saw myself like that, I broke. I just looked like shit!”
Nowadays, Last is more comfortable in the spotlight, but not before creating firm boundaries with his audience, and sparking a larger conversation about public figures’ right to privacy. “I stopped uploading new episodes for a while, because I convinced myself it was the only way to fade back into anonymity. But I was lucky - I had friends who picked me back up out of that hole, and reminded me of why I loved making UC in the first place. And once I’d sorted a few things out in my personal life, I was able to stand firm in crafting the show I love.” In an official statement posted to the Universe City Twitter account nearly 4 years ago, Last wrote:
“This project is too important to me to just end, and I know how important it is for many of you, too. But it will have to end if my privacy cannot be respected. You may know my name, you may know what I look like, but you do not know Who I Am, and you probably never will. I am so grateful for all the support you’ve given to the show - please, continue to give it to Radio, not me.”
The sentiment was brutal, but true, and a wake-up call to many fans of Universe City. “I have burner accounts,” Last tells me with a laugh. “I liked to keep tabs on the fandom, and there was a lot of cutting the wheat from the chaff in those early days. I’m sure there still are people out there who hate my guts because of that tweet. But at this point, I can’t bring myself to care. I know who Radio’s real fans are, and I know who my real friends are. Everyone else doesn’t matter.”
It’s that sentiment that allowed Last to have a series of incredible public moments. Over the next few years, Last would travel to MGM Comic Con here in London, visit Spotify HQ in San Francisco after reaching number 1 on their global podcast charts, and win two Webby Awards in New York City for Best Writing for a Podcast and The Experimental Innovation Award. In this short time, Universe City has sparked a huge boon in the world fiction podcasts and web series. Creators of shows like Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives have cited Universe City as a major influence in the creation of their own projects. “That was the craziest thing, I think. Those shows are way better than mine! I was definitely suffering from impostor syndrome after the Night Vale crew mentioned UC in that [ New Yorker ] interview. I was gaining at least a hundred new subscribers every day for like, two months straight, but my brain just tuned it out completely as if there was no way it could be possible. I just refused to acknowledge that I was actually gaining success like that. Going to MGM [Comic Con] actually made it all click for me. Meeting fans of the show on my own terms, who were sharing how much Radio meant to them, made me realize ‘Oh, this is bigger than me. It’s not just for me.’”
A majority of Universe City fans fall under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, which Last can relate to. “I was lucky to have a group of basically all queer friends in school. Gay people are like magnets, we’ll find each other one way or another.” And the character of Radio Silence has become a major source of comfort for young transgender listeners. In the canon of Universe City, Radio uses he and they pronouns, no labels, and is depicted in fanart as a variety of androgynous aesthetics. Last’s casual speaking voice sits relatively high, albeit with a bit of rasp due to the aforementioned cigarette, but Radio’s timbre is deliberately neutral, and varies slightly from episode to episode. “Again, it was all part of staying anonymous. If my voice was different from Radio’s, they wouldn’t connect him to Aled. Looking back, of course trans kids latched onto them. An ungendered mythic figure that mastered androgyny is someone living the dream. I obviously didn’t go in thinking, like, ‘this character is good queer representation.’ I don’t think we as creatives get to decide that. The audience does.”
Radio’s gender expression and sexuality have also sparked debate amongst fans online as well, citing the importance of queer characters to be written by queer authors. At a time when not much was known about Last, many thought it was unwise to attribute queer labels to the character when his author remained such a mystery. Last’s eyes roll as we delve into a discussion around queerbaiting. “It’s so stupid though, isn’t it? The whole point is that the audience can identify with him because there is such a limited amount of information given in the actual text of the show. It’d be so easy to say, like, ‘Yeah, Radio uses this one label and looks exactly like this,’ but it’s more interesting to me that it’s left up to interpretation.” As Last takes a sip from his water, he adds, “I am extremely fucking gay, though, to be clear. I just don’t want to talk about it all the time.”
Over the years, Last’s personal relationship to Radio has changed as well. As Universe City was airing, he expressed a protectiveness over the character that he’s since reined in. “He’s really not mine anymore, and that’s okay. Like, of course, no one loves him more than me - sorry, Tumblr - but I think a big part of creating anything is just… giving it over to the world once it’s done. It was really a lesson in futility. No matter what, I will not have control over the audience and that’s okay. The way that I interact with Universe City will always be different from the way the fans interact with it. Sometimes it aligns, like, I’ll see a piece of fanart of a setting and be like, ‘oh my god, that’s exactly right.’ Other times, the fans create something wholly and entirely new that I’ve never even considered. Now that UC has been done for a year, I’ve been able to look back at the full catalogue with a fresh perspective. It’s like looking back at it through fog.”
Of course, new fans are still finding Universe City, and are able to binge the full story now. For Last, he’s taking time to percolate new creative pursuits with minimal pressure. “I’ve been very lucky to have the time and resources to focus on new stories without really having to worry about the finances. I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m currently working on some new music stuff, and I’ve been writing. Like, a ton of writing. And for the fans of Universe City, Radio’s there. As he’s said over and over, he hopes someone is listening. I hope you still will.”