The ups were Hans Richter at the turn of the century and John Barbirolli from the 1940s to the 1960s. The downs came in between and after, sharpened by financial problems and unarrested by the past two years with Kent Nagano. Nagano seemed like an inspired appointment: young, dynamic, with a track record for opera projects in France that transferred to disc and won awards But in Manchester it hasn’t worked. There have been problems with the Halle management, which found Nagano an expensive luxury; and sharing a patch with Tortelier, he hasn’t been able to indulge his instinct for French repertory as he’d have liked.

Meanwhile, money problems have continued; and whatever the new hall does for morale, it does nothing to balance the books because the rent will be considerably more than the Free Trade Hall charged – odd when you consider that the Halle has a half-stake in the company that runs the new building. The acoustic engineers are Arups, who did the new Glyndebourne and are also very obviously out to challenge Birmingham (by general consent the best-sounding hall in Britain). A landmark building, Bridgewater seats 2,400, is constructed (like Birmingham) on the principle of concentric skins which are flexibly connected to absorb vibration, and the auditorium is (like Birmingham) laid out on basic shoebox principles – albeit modified by a Berlin Philharmonic-like division of the back tiers into blocks of varying height. The Bridgewater is not actually a Lottery project – the money came mostly from municipal sources in partnership with Europe – and the motivation behind it is to do for Manchester what Symphony Hall has done for Birmingham: a plain and simple case of civic rivalry.

Even if (as music’s all- wise Cassandra, Mr Norman Lebrecht, tells us) there are no orchestras or opera companies left in business by the year 2000, we’ll certainly have the finest stock of empty performance venues in existence; and the very latest is Manchester’s new Bridgewater Hall which opened on Wednesday Rather equivocally. O saisons, O chateaux. The new concert year has arrived and the talk is of buildings – as indeed it has been ever since the Lottery began to scatter its largesse over bricks and mortar. Dr Dangerfield has a new colleague, a middle- aged and highly attractive Irish woman doctor, Dr Robbins (“call me Annie”), who looks like a cross between Mary Robinson (President of the Irish Republic, for those ignoramuses who are on a break from playing Dungeons and Dragons) and Helena Kennedy. She’s happily married to a tolerant husband – a New Man to boot – and is thus just asking to have her life torn apart by a passionate affair with a lantern-jawed and monosyllabic hunk One just knows that sex with Dangerfield won’t be much fun. There’ll be no tickling or inane giggles, or chasing round the bedroom, or swapping of undergarments, or sudden applications of creme fraiche to each other’s neverwheres.

It’ll all be mouth-crushing, “We can’t do this”, needful grunting and tears at bedtime stuff.What might be fun would be to swap the characters from Neverwhere with those from Dangerfield (Dangerwhere? Neverfield?), and have a black doctor in dreadlocks and pantaloons swan around Warwickshire, while a middle-aged Irish President with smudges gets to have dinner with a nest of rats Not possible? Ah, Horatio There are more things in heaven and earth …. Nigel Le Vaillant, the lead actor in Dangerfield (BBC1, Friday), does not talk much to animals (in fact he doesn’t talk much to anybody He lets his jaw do all the talking And it says, “I am a hunk And I am a doctor Would you like to swoon now?”). But he did this week get to exchange premonitions with a medium. I am praying that she turns out be a fraud in the next episode, and that all this fashion for spookiness does not spill over into the GP/police-doctor/ vet/pathologist/police-vet genre, where science and tea have traditionally ruled.Anyway, I am not interested in the mystery of the blue rope and the old murders, thank you very much.