BBC Hamburg drama restores erased Beatles mentor
A new BBC drama filming in Germany will spotlight Lord Woodbine, the Trinidadian mentor erased from the Beatles' history, illustrating the enduring cross-border economic pull of European cultural heritage.
The BBC is producing a six-part drama, "Hamburg Days", focusing on the Beatles' formative period in the German port city between 1960 and 1962. During that stint, the band played more than 250 gigs near the notorious Reeperbahn. The series is currently shooting in both Liverpool and Germany, drawing on the memoirs of Klaus Voormann, the artist who designed the cover for the band's 1966 album "Revolver".
Rather than retreading standard band lore, writer Jamie Carragher is using the series to restore the legacy of Lord Woodbine. The Trinidadian calypso musician, real name Harold Adolphus Phillips, served as an early co-manager and mentor to the group alongside first manager Allan Williams.
For European public life, the production underscores how shared cultural history continues to drive cross-border film production, with British broadcasters utilising German locations to monetise a jointly significant story. It also forces a public reckoning with how that history has been recorded.
Phillips arrived in Britain in 1943 as a Royal Air Force flight engineer and later returned on the Empire Windrush, famously standing beside Lord Kitchener at Tilbury Dock. After settling in Liverpool's Toxteth district to find his wartime sweetheart, he managed the Jacaranda club and worked as a builder and decorator.
"They used to come and offer to clean and collect glasses for Woodbine," said academic Malik Al Nasir, who researched Phillips for the British Library. "In return Woodbine would feed them and help them out by teaching them chords."
Despite allegedly driving the band to Germany in a beaten-up Volkswagen, Phillips was written out of the official narrative after Brian Epstein took over management. Al Nasir noted that Phillips and the influence of black Liverpool had been "airbrushed" out of history. Phillips died in a house fire in 2000, having previously expressed hurt over a cropped photograph from a Hamburg trip used in a 1992 Liverpool play.
Carragher noted that Lennon and McCartney respected Woodbine because he wrote his own songs via the calypso tradition. The effort to restore his place in the band's story arrives as the film industry's appetite for Beatles narratives accelerates. Sam Mendes is scheduled to release four separate biopics in 2028, starring Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan.
