Lenny Henry's 'Three Little Birds' To Premiere in 2023

BritBox has several high-profile projects heading to streaming for 2023, from the Cary Grant biopic Archie to the Death in Paradise spinoff Beyond Paradise. But one of the streaming service’s most significant gets is landing the new historical drama from Sir Lenny Henry, partly based on the oral family histories relayed by his mother, written in collaboration with Russell T. Davies. Titled Three Little Birds, after the famous Bob Marley and the Wailers song from 1977, it chronicles the experience of the Windrush Generation of British-African Caribbean immigrants who came to the U.K. after the 1948 passing of The British Nationality Act.

The project was initially greenlit by ITV in 2020, with Henry and Davies executive producing along with Angela Ferreira and production studio Tiger Aspect’s head of drama, Lucy Bedford. (Tiger Aspect and Henry’s own production outfit, Douglas Road Productions, are both housed under the wider Banijay group umbrella.) At the time, Henry praised Davies for mentoring him through the scriptwriting process, helping him translate these oral histories he grew up with into televisual stories to share with the broader world. BritBox boarded the project to distribute internationally in June 2022.

Though the stories are based on his mother’s tales, Henry has fictionalized them, saying they inspired him to imagine “three Caribbean women, all with differing yet complementary attributes. Although these are fictional accounts, my mother’s narrative will run throughout these stories, and hopefully, the stories of other post-Windrush arrivals will trigger memories, smiles, and tears too.”