Lucifer is an experience that has to be lived to be believed. It is almost impossible to rate. Considered as a work of art — let alone one bearing the august brand of Faction Paradox, albeit all-but-unofficially — it is so astonishingly poor that half-a-star feels generous, on nearly every level of craft. However, it is that rare novelty in our post-ironic age: a genuine, unintentional so-bad-it's-good classic. There is a sense in which I could find myself “recommending” that you listen to this… but only if you enjoy a good laugh.

The really odd thing is that it didn't have to be this way. I remember when this was first announced, and, despite my growing rift with BBV Productions at the time, I actually cautiously looked forward to it, wondering if Trevor Spencer would be a man worth bringing over to other projects outside Bill Baggs's domain. On paper, there is… something here, something that even makes me wonder if a strong editing and directorial hand could have made it into a genuinely good audio drama, were Baggs not in the habit of slapping first drafts onto his shopfront without ever asking for a second opinion.

After all, as an elevator pitch, Von-Daniken-ing the Book of Genesis has a pleasantly irreverent chutzpah to it. The specifics are even fairly entertaining, even if they display a distressing lack of interest in the actual textual history of Judaic and later Christian mythology. There is a boldness to making Lucifer a winged alien from Venus — the original Morning Star, don't you know? —, or reimagining the temptation of the Forbidden Fruit as an ill-advised cider binge. Even Cousin Lucifer's characterisation as a fatuous, dickish dilettante who should never have been allowed near a time machine actually gets closer to the spirit of Faction Paradox as Lawrence Miles defined it than any number of dire attempts at spooky edginess. Add to it the welcome use of a pilot-and-humanoid-timeship dynamic that feels right at home in the War in Heaven, and you have the building blocks of what could have been a perfectly viable audio answer to the more whimsical end of Obverse-era Faction Paradox.

It isn't even that Spencer's documented affection for the Tom Ellis-led Lucifer TV series was necessarily a red flag. I watched the whole thing myself, and it isn't as if a bunch of Doctor Who fans have any first stones to cast when it comes to a formative affection for a television series which, in the cold light of day, only intermittently rises beyond eccentric genre shlock. Much great Faction Paradox has been derived from an author pursuing an idiosyncratic hobby-horse and weaving it into the Spiral Politic. And although it is difficult to pinpoint how much of Cousin Lucifer's pathetic, sleazy vibe is intentional, as opposed to an artefact of incompetent execution (after all, Spencer clearly thinks his Lucifer possesses a degree of genuine sexual charisma), it is certainly noteworthy and indeed praiseworthy that Spencer's Lucifer is not some straight-up ersatz of the Tom Ellis version, but an in-universe fanboy who's clearly not as cool as he thinks he is.

Aye. But the crucial problem is that Trevor Spencer doesn't know what he's doing. It is difficult to avoid the sense that he improvised Lucifer's rambling monologue as he recorded it, rather than working from a proper script; the narration lurches awkwardly from casual American slang to a more literary register mid-sentence, and some sentence fragments are even left dangling with no grammatical line or reason — see for example “I saw statues of what appeared to be both me and that of Jehovah.” [sic].

Add to this a slurred, nasal monotone which sounds more like a mid-level gaming streamer than any kind of dramatic performance, and an audio that mostly consists of Spencer's narration would smother its theoretically-amusing tale even if the actual story was well-handled, which, frankly, it isn't. The Biblical characters barely emerge as personalities, when any good execution of this premise should have rounded out Adam, Eve, Lilith, and even Jehovah into proper characters, not just walking plot points. Babylon, Lucifer's actually-cunningly-named Timeship, is the only character with a personality to speak of, but — in this story, at least — her sarcastic quips barely rise to the level of Greek Chorus and are certainly not enough to hold the audience's interest. Listening to Lucifer inescapably feels like little more than being rambled at by a smug, drunken idiot who thinks he's some sort of undiscovered comedian, while never knowing when and why you're supposed to laugh.

It's hard to blame Spencer for the incompetent audio editing. Sure, the voice-tracks are scratchy, the scene-change effects are painful and much too long — but such problems are really Baggs's fault, and have let down perfectly decent scripts. Unfortunately, as written, as recorded… even with the best will in the world, Lucifer was never, ever going to work. In the end, where a more typically Baggsian sense of feckless greed might otherwise have rendered it a miserable slog through and through, only Trevor Spencer's palpable enthusiasm for the material makes the experience tolerable, in a mix of genuine fondness for an idiosyncratic amateur's drive, and amusement at the disconnect between his delusions of artistic grandeur and the astonishingly shoddy end result.

To think he went on to make dozens of these…!

Really weird way to integrate the Bible mythos while sounding like a kid making it up as he goes, but okay!