COMMUNITY
The BromleyBoy Comes to the Algarve BY SOPHIE SADLER
Bromley and Lagos are not two places you would often say in one breath. Through serendipity, however, these two points are where actor and film producer TJ Herbert's stars have aligned. When I met TJ, he is thanking his lucky stars that he moved to Lagos in February, just before lockdown. He reflects that the Algarve, which he has been visiting for 26 years, is a better place to have been in isolation than his London flat. His parents bought a house in Lagos after having seen it in an advert in the Sunday Times. They extended it to form two properties, in which he and his sister enjoyed many happy holidays. Being in lockdown has allowed him, his Australian wife and six-year-old daughter to do some renovating on the property which he plans to also use as a film location. We are meeting though, not to discuss Lagos, but Bromley, following the success of his film, The Bromley Boys, which been described as a “Must See” by The Times. It was the culmination of a seven-year journey after setting up his own production company, Itchy Fish.
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creative side. In the late 1990s he did a postgraduate course in performing arts and had been a jobbing actor for 15 years when he had his epiphany in Waterstones. “After many years trying to get a break I decided to take matters into my own hands and launched my own production company. My mission statement was to become the master of my own destiny – if I was going to get a welly up the only way I could see that happening was generating my own material. I trotted off to Waterstones in Bromley and was immediately greeted by a poster of Dave Roberts, in his Bromley shirt, arms crossed, promoting The Bromley Boys: The true story of supporting the worst football team in Britain. As both a Bromley boy and a football fan (Crystal Palace) I was immediately intrigued and bought the book. I read it front to back in a matter of hours and thought, this is the one.”
TJ definitely looks like a film star, wearing a peaked hat and John Lennon sunglasses he stands out among the other diners at Fresco, yet he started his working career as a lawyer and followed his father into marine insurance. There was a creative gene in the family: his uncle was horror author James Herbert, and it is from him that TJ believes he acquired his love of telling stories.
This was the start of his film-making journey which would make a biopic in its own right. He hunted down the author, then residing in Connecticut, and convinced him to give him the rights for six months in order to develop a screenplay. A couple of years prior to this he had played a role in a comedy pilot about a lowly non-league football team. The series didn’t get commissioned but it did introduce him to the writer Warren Dudley.
Aged 25, he decided he needed a change in direction and wanted to explore his
“I loved his writing combining football and comedy so it was an easy choice in getting
