Tina Turner- the singer of soul and feeling.

Tina Turner- the singer of soul and feeling.

The words and sentences may be more measured now but Tina Turner has always been the soul singer with heart, passion and soul, a woman of red blooded intensity, vocal ferocity and irrepressible power. Now though might be the right time to slow down, smell the roses perhaps, sit back and luxuriate on a mammoth and phenomenal career which started as a trainee nurse and ended up in one of the most turbulent relationships - marriage with a man called Ike.

Last night on BBC1's excellent documentary and life story of the one and only Tina Turner we were taken on a whistlestop tour of Turner's painfully harrowing if ultimately triumphant life. Turner was thoughtful, but assured, happy yet regretful, searingly honest and sometimes bittersweet into the bargain. She didn't blame anybody as such but did give a very moving account of how life's initially smooth progress was tragically stalled before dropping through the trapdoor of a disastrous downward spiral. But then she clambered her way back into daylight and it all came right.

The programme featured, quite obviously, Turner's almost constantly abusive and explosive relationship with husband Ike which must have driven her to the edge of the precipice. But then the feisty and superbly resilient Turner came back once again and proved that life without Ike could indeed be both beneficial and ultimately successful. In fact when Turner eventually split with Ike it may have been one of the greatest days in her life.

Starting out on life training to be a nurse, Turner one day decided that a life in a clinical hospital ward wasn't for her. Turner wanted to become one of the most famous soul singing divas the world had ever seen. We would soon be introduced to one of the most rasping, husky and unforgettable voices in the history of pop and soul music. Turner was like a stick of dynamite, her voice blasting out across the vast concert stadiums and echoing across borders and continents with a dynamism and force that spanned the 1960s and then the following decades.

Now living in Switzerland with her new partner, Turner talked revealingly about the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the emotional minefield which threatened to blow up with quite the most serious consequences and then more about the destructive Ike. There was the violent Ike, the aggressive Ike, the flare ups, the friction, the fights and battles that came to characterise their marriage from hell. It soon became clear that Turner had to get out of this toxic husband and wife alliance. She was throwing her career away because a troubled man couldn't control his anger.

After her debut single 'It's Gonna Work Out Fine' with Ike had broken into the American charts, Tuner found that maybe the song did have an appropriate resonance. Clearly, both Ike and Tina looked as though they were ideally suited to each other, that it could work out in the long term. Then there were the ugly quarrels, the drink problems, the traumatic days and months when nothing seemed to go right. They fell out wildly, fought like cat and dog and then discovered that things couldn't continue in the way they had been.

Turner quite candidly admits that Ike made her feel like a prisoner, stifling her, cramping her style, confining her to a bit part in the partnership. Maybe there was a part of Tina that might have privately suspected that had she carried on with Ike then a blossoming career would just sink without trace. But then Turner must have found the keys to unlock her from this living hell. And then both Ike and Tina met up with a man called Phil Spector.

Spector was an ingenious, speculative, inventive and pioneering record producer with a treasure chest of new sounds and markedly different approaches to pop music. Spector gave us the 'Wall of Sound', a truly remarkable approach to music and its content. River Deep Mountain High would become one of the most defining, iconic, groundbreaking songs the 1960s would ever know.

River Deep  Mountain High would be the dramatic launching pad for Tina and Ike Turner. Suddenly the backing track for a hit single would sound like something from a big budget Hollywood film. A big orchestral instrumental production would change Ike and Tina's life for ever more. It was rather like admiring a three dimensional piece of art work where all the surfaces and textures of the record would take the breath away.

By the end Tina Turner was on her own after kicking Ike into touch and leaving him to dwell on what might have been. There followed the Tina renaissance, a reinvention of the singer she used to be but now in a new environment and a much more positive place in her life. She would single handedly write out one of the most classical rags to riches stories America would ever witness. She may have been on her own but the life of a solo singer had to be preferable to an utterly dysfunctional one with Ike.

So it was that we had I Don't Wanna Fight, Private Dancer, Steamy Windows, Let's Stay Together and What's Love Got to Do With It and who could ever forget The Best, Simply the Best. Turner had burst out of her prison cell, thrown off the shackles, busting the chains of torment and heartache that might have trapped her forever. Turner was the liberated soul, free to go where ever she wanted and do whatever she liked, released from what must have been the terrifying ordeal that was being with Ike.

With those still thick red pouting lips, frizzy hair that seemed to bounce buoyantly on her head and a voice that still crackles with energy, Turner is now relaxed, totally confessional, even more frank and determined to let the whole world know that she could still belt out a song from the heart. The overwhelming pressures, stresses and anxieties that may have pulled her down were no longer in evidence. She'd battled back from the brink, forgotten the wretched Ike and now just wanted to concentrate on the more important priorities that life would have in store for her.

Turner married for the second time her German record company executive and, for all the world, appeared as though the weight of the world had been yanked from her tired shoulders. The aches and pains were still there but when all was said and done, Tina Turner had come through the bad times, fought against the dire predicaments, survived the vices and just got on with it when the critics just wanted their pound of flesh.

Nowadays Turner lives in Switzerland, perhaps one of Europe's safest and most neutral havens where nobody can disturb her domestic idyll. In the final minutes of last night's warts and all  Tina Turner life story, she reflected perhaps sadly on the America she'd grown to love while she was growing up but an America that  had now lost its way. Of course America would always be there for her and the sense of nostalgic yearning for her birthplace had to be recognised. But this was a new chapter, a clean page.

 But Switzerland is where the soul singing legend wanted to be and besides who wouldn't want to be subjected to the sound of those famous cuckoo clocks on a chilly November evening? Simply the Best may sound like the most gross exaggeration but then again she can still deliver a song and of that there can never be any doubt.