A GALA dinner, as one or other of these columns may hitherto have observed, is now the accepted term for any desperately devised event comprising more than one course, an effrontery of horseradish and a bread bun with the "broth".

Almost always they are held in crepuscular hotels or spartan civic sports centres, usually at Christmas with a Mikki and Griff tribute band and a balloon (optional).

In Durham City, however, the expression has fresh meaning. There is a bright new Gala Theatre, pronounced as in "parlour" by management but as in "Sailor" by the great majority of council tax payers whose daily intake consists of breakfast, dinner, tea and supper and with ten o'clocks and three o'clocks jam sandwiched in between.

We arrived at 1.15pm last Wednesday - it was to be a Gala dinner, if not a gala performance. Almost everyone in the city appeared aurally to be attached to a mobile phone, as if giving last minute instructions to their trainers. In the Market Place, a bunch of inflatable bananas of the sort that briefly became fashionable at lower division football grounds - but not at Grimsby Town, where they had inflatable haddocks - was bouncing around in the breeze.

Probably it's what they call art.

The theatre, this end of Claypath, has a top level dining room with "dramatic views on three sides" and a ground floor caf-bar - where we ate - with views over a school football pitch, and beyond. Since there wasn't a cast of thousands, or hardly anyone at all, a bored looking waitress went around collecting all the little plastic thingies which indicate the table numbers, returning a few moments later with different numbers, one higher.

Art? They win Turner Prizes for less.

The menu is short to the point of clinical dwarfism; whatever else they may be spoiled for at the Gala Theatre, it certainly isn't choice.

Soup was the only starter. Main courses were either smoked chicken, avocado and crispy bacon salad or grilled butternut squash, toasted pine nuts, blue cheese and penne pasta. There were four different sandwiches.

You order at a counter where the sun shone directly into the poor girl's eyes - a case of the blinded feeding the blind - and onto unprotected food.

Dusty Springfield played beguilingly on the CD but is unlikely, alas, to be making a personal appearance.

The soup was mushroom, the wait for it so long that they might have popped out to Flass Vale (or somewhere similarly sylvan) to pick the things field fresh. It arrived with bread and butter but without a knife with which to apply one to the other.

As befits a state of the art new theatre, the soup was from the innovative edge nonetheless. It tasted for all the world like mushroom semolina.

The salad had none of the advertised croutons and a question mark over the balsamic dressing. Were it dressed at all, it was for pole dancing and not for serious theatre.

The rest was limp and lugubrious, happily interrupted by the municipal equivalent of Mikki and Griff.

It was a chap from the City arts department who'd been involved last year with the creation of a giant "roundy", an imaginative sculpture in Ushaw Moor which acknowledges the village's deep mined foundations.

Predictably, pathetically, it has suffered serious vandalism. The arts officer recalled a previous posting where a fast growing plant marketed commercially as "vulgaris disembowelis" had been hedged about to keep the wreckers at bay.

Durham is considering it. Vulgaris emasculatis might be better still.

The two course meal cost £9.90, a pint of Roughwith £2.10. As gala dinners go it was about par for the courses, but the theatre - the caf-bar, anyway - can only stage a comeback.

Thank God for Dusty Springfield.

THE following afternoon, happily, Paul McDonald and Nikki Chapman put on a very much better show. Eleven years singly together, nine working the world, they have returned to Darlington to take over Tyler's restaurant in Duke Street.

Why on earth? "We needed to make some more money," they chorus, cheerfully.

Who knows, "item" might even become plight 'em while they're here. "It's a matter of getting an afternoon off," says Paul.

By day, Tuesday to Saturday, it's a two person operation. On busy nights, Nikki's joined up front by the legendary Dorothy Howard, familiar for half a century or more in the Darlington pub and catering trade.

Dorothy, bless her, had worked there previously. She told them she was 55. "Mind," says Nikki, "that was in November."

Two hundred yards from the tumultuous town centre, they attempt to draw lunchtime trade with fresh, inexpensive and often imaginative dishes from a weekly changing list where everything is £4.50.

Last week's embraced Mexican bean tostadas with sour cream and salsa, home-made beef patties with corn relish and curly fried potatoes and colcannon and sausage with gravy. Rack up five on the 450 club card and there's a free pudding, ten earns a free main course.

Four soups included chicken and corn - generous, substantial, absolutely first rate - which the Artful Accountant followed with poached salmon with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing, another of the £4.50 specials.

He also enjoyed a pint of Roughwith. The only trouble with the Accountant is that he fails to understand the close connection between smooth and baby's bottom. We had grilled Cajun chicken, lightly spiced and in a cracked wheat roll, with a pail full of garlic mayonnaise and about four stones of terrific sauted potatoes.

Alone on a tempting menu, puddings aren't home-made. The sponge was very nice but the ginger barely discernible, the Accountant had something called a raspberry zinger which - one zinger, one zong - he considered excellent.

The bad news is that, knotted or not, the happy couple intend in a year or so again to set off on their travels. Go now, before they go without you.

THE following afternoon to Darlington Camra's "Spring Thing" festival at the Arts Centre, one problem was the weather was so dire it might as well have been mid-winter.

As ever, the intention was admirable: dozens of beers that travel well and are clearly cherished upon arrival.

There was Porker's Pride from Cornwall, Cooking Bitter from Rutland, Auld Rock from Shetland and excellent local ales like Shrimpers (Durham Brewery), Workie Ticket (Mordue) and the seven per cent abv pugli pani - Hindi for "crazy water", apparently - from the Wylam Brewery in the Tyne Valley.

The other problem, the one within their control, was the opening hours. Camra, an organisation which rightly and relentlessly campaigns for sensible drinking, insisted that the Friday bar close on the stroke of 3pm.

"No volunteer staff," they said, though six or seven had hitherto spent much of the time gossiping. A lame excuse, a lamentable own goal.

STILL supping real ale, we mentioned two or three weeks back a visit to the Horse and Cart brew-pub near Brigg in Lincolnshire. Michael Patterson, landlord of the Daleside Arms at Croxdale, had coincidentally ordered some of their beers at the same time but because of poor quality returned it whence it came. It is called the Faint Hope Brewery.

LAST week's column had cause to mention the Durham Ox at (or near) Beamish in north-west Durham, said by former Vaux managing director Frank Nicholson to have had the longest bar in England.

Maybe it had. Via the Guinness Book of Records, however, Tom Purvis reckons that the Long Bar in the Cornwall Coliseum Auditorium in Carlyon Bay is now the record holder - 104 feet and 34 beer and lager dispensers.

Children of the swinging seventies may also remember the copper topped Variety Club in Spennymoor - or indeed its namesake in Batley - which may have offered Cornwall a run for its money.

Frank Nicholson hasn't been available. Has anyone lengthy memories of the Durham Ox?

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you get if you cross an elephant with half a ton of strawberries.

Jambo.

Published: Tuesday, March 19, 2002