Guiltily compelling: Spector, on Sky Documentaries, reviewed

On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’

This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well be the strangest figure in pop history. By that stage, he perhaps deserved the description of him in one news report as ‘a ghost, a phantom, a half-forgotten rock genius’. Except that – whether by coincidence or something more sinister – he’d recently granted his first interview for decades to the British journalist Mick Brown. ‘I have devils inside me,’ said Spector during their conversation. ‘For all intents and purposes, I think I’m relatively insane.’

In fact, the day the interview was published was the same one on which he shot dead Lana Clarkson, a B-movie actress who, the investigating officer somewhat disturbingly emphasised, was a ‘very beautiful young woman, with her legs stretched out in front of her’. And just in case that wasn’t clear enough, we were also shown several crime-scene photos of the legs in question.

The same blend of gripping narrative and slightly dodgy visuals continued when we flashed back to Spector’s early life in the Bronx, severely derailed at the age of nine when his father killed himself. (Cue a film-noir reconstruction of a bloke in a 1940s hat connecting a tube from the exhaust pipe to the inside of his car and turning on the ignition.) A few years later, Spector, his overbearing mother and bipolar sister moved to LA where he arrived at the perfect time to be part of the nascent teen-music scene. While still 18, he wrote his first number one, ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, a yearning teen anthem whose title was taken from the epitaph on his father’s grave.