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…!

Few bylines, on a Wiki listing, are as depressing as "Lance Parkin, Jonathan Blum, and Bill Baggs". A script by two of the Wilderness Years' most talented, interesting writers — and the extended Doctor Who universe's most lamentable hack? That can only mean one thing: a tortured production resulting in a fundamentally compromised final work, and that, in essence, is exactly what When Being You Just Isn't Enough is. Never mind the title that sounds like an adult parody, and the sleazy cover of the original DVD release: this film isn't the cheap adult cash-in that its reputation as a fandom punchline would have you believe.

It's much sadder than that.

There are, plainly visible in the final cut, the bones of a very good spin-off film indeed. The basic premise is of a conflict between two Zygon sleeper-agents, one of whom has grown to enjoy his life on Earth while the other still looks forward to raining terror upon the primitive apes — which is essentially the material Peter Harness would revisit on television in Series 9, presented here as more of a character piece than the ostentatious satirical parable of Zygon Inversion. That the humanised Zygon, Kritakh, has forgotten his true identity and believes himself to be the human he became is an interesting twist. One which, perhaps, isn't given as much room to breathe as it would have been in the novels to which Blum and Parkin were better used — but it's as good a reason as any to work in the psychiatry angle, permitting the return of Jo Castleton; Cyberon's finest cast member returns in fine form, and the character she and the scripts craft deserves so much better than the DVD backcover blurb's description of her as (sigh) "a sexy psychiatrist".

Alright, so, the sex. It would be simplistic to say the sex scenes are only there by Baggs's editorial mandate; sexuality was clearly a part of the original thematic vision for the film. Lauren's unwilling transformation into a shapeshifter plays, at first, as a fantasy of total hedonistic freedom, and part of it is her decision to not only buy herself all kinds of nice things on a rich man's credit card after stealing his appearance, but also bedding his mistress while still in his body. But… you know… that's interesting! I daresay it even explores some surprisingly complex queer themes for a film written in the mid-2000s — Lauren's clear inner conflict about having enjoyed being with another woman for the first time in her life, but only as a man, is played with lovely subtlety by Castleton; the reveal in the 2020 Cyberon anthology that a future Lauren had embraced genderfluidity very much flows out of the material we get here. And yes, there are all kinds of ethical red flags about the circumstances of that tryst — but, again, that's the story. Lauren is tempted by the Mephistophelean Torlakh into some pretty morally-gray behaviour indeed, before walking back from the brink. It's an adult drama, not in the euphemistic sense but the actual, serious, literary one. The problem isn't any of that. The problem isn't even that [shock, horror] there is a bit of onscreen male nudity. All this, while not everyone's cup of tea, and quite far away from your whole teatime Tom Baker japes, is really quite respectable; it's what Torchwood wanted to be, and only rarely succeeded. None of it is the problem.

No, the problem is that the film was produced by a cheapskate, directed by an artless workman, and reedited five years later by a venal, shoddy disaster-artist who wants to put in more nudity because Sex Sells. All three of those film-ruining hooligans are, needless to say, hats worn by William Baggs himself. Jo Castleton and Keith Drinkel's lovely performances — and Daniel Harcourt's entirely serviceable turn — are trapped in flatly-lit rooms and unimpressive locations. Only very occasionally does Baggs take a stab at any interesting angles, lighting, shadow-work. The crime thriller scenes are not tense, the body-horror scenes are not horrible, and the sex scene is not sexy. In Baggs's terminally incapable hands, a moody, sensual tale of murder and temptation feels nothing so much as grubby. It's Clive Barker directed by Tommy Wiseau. (Sex scene singular, you'll note; perhaps surprisingly, there's really only one, laughable in how clearly superfluous it is, spliced into what was clearly supposed to be a tasteful transition between non-graphic foreplay, and the characters waking up a few hours later. Although there is also a gratuitous scene with a topless Lauren, plus the notorious instances of frontal nudity from the male leads, both of which are resolutely non-sexual.)

In the end, the watching experience is not without value if you're morbidly curious, or even a generous enough viewer that you're interested in trying to make out the outline of the film Blum and Parkin thought they'd scripted. If you've given the film a pass on the assumption that it was just a grubby cash-in, perhaps reconsider (although I wouldn't recommend giving Baggs any money over it). But if it comes down to a yea-or-nay — then no, this doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. It might have, in another timeline, and that is remarkable enough; but we aren't so lucky.