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’.