BBC 'Hamburg Days' to spotlight Beatles mentor Lord Woodbine
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- BBC is producing a six-part drama called "Hamburg Days" covering the Beatles' 1960–1962 Hamburg period, during which the band played more than 250 gigs, with filming taking place in Liverpool and Germany.
- Lord Woodbine (real name Harold Adolphus Phillips), a Trinidadian calypso musician who first came to Britain in 1943 as an RAF flight engineer and later arrived on the Empire Windrush, will be portrayed by the Sherwood actor Jorden Myrie.
- Woodbine co-managed the Beatles with Allan Williams and ran Liverpool's Jacaranda club; Lennon and McCartney cleaned glasses and collected empties for him in exchange for food and chord lessons, according to Al Nasir.
- Carragher says the series highlights Woodbine as a songwriter in the calypso tradition, noting "there weren't many people in their lives at this point who wrote their own songs" — and one of Lennon's earliest compositions was called Calypso Rock.
- Phillips was largely written out of Beatles history after Brian Epstein took over management; he died in a house fire in 2000 aged 72, and a Windrush Foundation plaque was unveiled outside the Jacaranda last summer in recognition of his cultural impact.
- The series is inspired by the memoirs of Klaus Voormann, who met the Beatles in Hamburg as a young artist and went on to design the cover of their 1966 album Revolver.
- Sam Mendes's four separate Beatles biopics — casting Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Joseph Quinn as Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Starr — are also due for release in 2028.
Why it matters: The drama reinserts a Black Trinidadian musician's formative role into the origin story of the world's most famous band — a narrative Al Nasir says was 'airbrushed' once Epstein consolidated control. With Mendes's separate 2028 biopics also in the pipeline, 'Hamburg Days' lands as one of two high-profile attempts to revisit the Beatles' early years, and the Windrush Foundation plaque outside the Jacaranda signals broader institutional recognition of the contribution.
