Old Profanity Showboat (Thekla)

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Vivian and Ki in the hold, early days

The Old Profanity Showboat was a late 1982 middle-of-the-night brainchild of Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, the wife of Vivian Stanshall, one of England's national treasures. The showboat was based on the idea of creating, owning, and running a theatre on a sea-going ship and using it to showcase music of every sort (limited only by the size of the hold), including cabaret, comedy, plays, musicals, and poetry events. The ship also contained an art gallery. The living quarters were home for Vivian, Ki, their daughter, Silky Longfellow-Stanshall, and Ki's daughter, Sydney Longfellow, as well as a few key personnel.

1 Finding and converting a ship into a showboat
2 Sailing into Tumult
3 Old Profanity Days
4 Stinkfoot
5 All Hands Abandon Ship
6 Fast Forward
7 Footnotes
8 External links

[edit] Finding and converting a ship into a showboat

Once conceived, the project was rapidly set into motion. Funds came from The Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme, whereby a bank lends the money, and the UK government guarantees the loan. Rusting away for seven years after running aground at Gateshead, a German built "Baltic Trader" named Thekla was discovered in the half-abandoned docks of Sunderland on the eastern coast of England. The SS Thekla was perfect. The last of the riveted ships, she was 450 tons, measured one hundred and eighty feet long from stem to stern, and thirty feet wide, with an eight foot draft. The Thekla was capable of circumnavigating the globe. Because she'd carried a cargo of primarily grains, her hold was vast, open, clean, and lined with one of the hardest woods in the world, red jarrah from Australia. Everything had to be refurbished from the U-boat engine (left over from the Second World War), to the leaky hydraulics to the donkey winch for raising and lowering the anchors. In the summer of 1983, she set sail for Bristol on the opposite side of Britain, a city chosen because Vivian had once played there as frontman for The Bonzo Dog Band, and because Ki liked the sound of the place.

Fresh out of dry dock with her bottom scraped, and covered in a new coat of black paint and white paint, plus a rather nice red for the stack, and with all the ironwork and welding accomplished, the SS Thekla sailed 732 nautical miles to Bristol in six days and six nights.

[edit] Sailing into Tumult

Vivian paints the doors into the hold

From the open sea, the ss Thekla entered the Severn on August the 4th, 1983 and navigated its waters until it arrived in the Floating Harbour of the city of Bristol, and moored where it can be found to this very day^[1]. There are now signs created by the City Council of Bristol for the orientation of tourists that sport a small symbol indicating Thekla's position in the docks.

She had sailed without ballast, without registration, without insurance, and without mishap, save for the half day the crew spent mending the engine. Her conversion, sailing, docking, finishing touches, and opening night on May 1st of 1984 was filmed as an Omnibus BBC 1 documentary by writer and film maker Tony Staveacre of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He called it The Bristol Showboat Saga and it was broadcast for the first time on September 30th of that year.

[edit] Old Profanity Days

For the next two and a half years, The Old Profanity Showboat put on over 240 theatrical productions, staging the varied efforts of theatrical troops from all over Britain, plus the work of the students of the nearby Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. To support its theatre and cabaret (which seldom paid for itself), the Old Pro also provided a stage for every kind of band then playing. Being the heyday of punk rock, some of her band nights were not only well-attended, they were terrifying.

Within a year, the Old Pro was the West Country's premier small theatre, jazz venue, folk club and cabaret. Across her stage came hopefuls who became "names," and often unannounced "names" who wanted to once again experience the intimacy of their first foray into show business. In no small part due to Vivian, most of Britain's best and brightest comedians either played there, or stayed^[2] there. But in virtually no time, the ship's own reputation attracted the best.

[edit] Stinkfoot

Quotation

"The ideas spill out of him: pastiche, the surreal, visual jokes, and new songs by the conveyor belt...the marvel is that here is an original, unusual musical, smelling of the salt sea." (from the The Guardian

David Foote

Many of the Old Pro's employees^[3] worked the bar or the box office or ship's maintenance in order to find themselves one day treading her stage. After two years of hopeful waiting, Ki felt they could wait no longer. No matter how much it cost to stage an original show, the time had come to reward their hard work and dedication.

Co-written by Vivian Stanshall and Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, Stinkfoot^[4] was a three-hour long musical comedy (Vivian called it a "comic opera^[5]"), produced by Ki, directed by Vivian (working with both actors and orchestra at the same time), and performed on the Old Pro over a two-week run up to Christmas in December of 1985. Stinkfoot's cast and orchestra^[6] consisted of the employees, as well as regulars who'd graced Thekla's stage. Its set made use of Thekla's curious layout. Its conception was based on a series of tales Ki wrote about a New York City alleycat and on Vivian's life as a Bonzo frontman. In its final form, it was a surreal and dazzling cross-cultural mix of music hall, Broadway, and Thirties screwball comedies. But mostly, it was "just being itself," as Vivian would say. It played to sell-out audiences every single night of its run, attracted people from Scotland to the USA, and it garnered wonderful, if slightly puzzled, reviews from not only the Bristol press, but The Guardian and The Times.

Staged a second time in late 1988 at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, it lacked the cockeyed appeal of Thekla's unusual setting, and the hand-picked Bristol cast and orchestra (for which much of the material was specifically crafted). It terminally lacked Vivian's unique hand on the tiller.

[edit] All Hands Abandon Ship

Moored in the Floating Harbour

By early 1986, even though the ship had survived the expense of staging Stinkfoot, and even though there was a plan to sail the Thekla at least to the port of New York City to try her artistic mettle there, Ki had become exhausted by the day to day running of such a huge venture. Vivian, buoyed by the experience of Stinkfoot, was eager to renew his recording career, Ki to continue her career as a novelist. (See External links.) Ki was also experiencing ill-health due to the constant stress of managing something so complex and time-consuming as The Old Profanity Showboat. Announcing closure of the ship, there came a deluge of protest by artists and customers whose home it had become. Accordingly, the Old Pro continued to showcase theater and bands until August 1986 but it was decided no one could go on any longer without risk to their sanity.

Ki, Vivian, and Silky retreated to the Bristol home of the actor David Rappaport (who appeared in the film Time Bandits).

[edit] Fast Forward

A major refurbishment of the ship was completed in October 2006 after being purchased by Daybrook House Promotions, owners of Rock City, Rescue Rooms, Stealth and The Social in Nottingham. At the same date the clubs name was changed to Thekla Social, but the ship name remained unchanged. She remains at the moorings in central Bristol where she was first positioned in 1983 and continues to function as a music venue and nightclub.

Thekla photographed in Bristol in 2005, before the 2006 refurbishment. The graffiti on the side of the ship is a skeleton rowing a boat, by the artist Banksy.

[edit] Footnotes

^ The Thekla is still moored in Bristol's Floating Harbour exactly where she was docked in 1983. Today she is for hire and is used as a venue for various bands and events.
^ No advertisements were ever placed anywhere. No one was ever actually interviewed and formally "hired." Thekla's people either came from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, or as customers...and kept coming back and coming back until a place was found for them.
^ The Bristol production of Stinkfoot was celebrated in print by Sea Urchin Press (see external links) with full script, song lyrics, cast, artwork by Vivian, and an introduction by Ki.
^ It was not, he insisted, about Christmas, or for Christmas, and it certainly was not a pantomime, a very British style of entertainment traditionally put on in theatres over the Christmas period.
^ Vivian called it his "awkestra"