BOOK of the DAY

BREAKFAST IN BRIGHTON: Adventures on the Edge of Britain

by Nigel Richardson

Gollancz, #16.99

OVER the three evenings when I was reading this book Brighton appeared on television four times: as the setting or Lynda La Plante's Killer Net, as the background in a series featuring the group North and South, and as the location for two episodes of The Bill, which included a dodgy antique dealer and a scene in a gay club. The reputation of the town might almost be summed up by those appearances.

It's a reputation which enthuses Nigel Richardson, deputy travel editor of the Daily Telegraph: ''I was beginning to see Brighton as the antithesis of England. How did England ever produce a town with the fizz, the craziness of Brighton?'' He spent last summer there, as much as his work permitted, trying to define the secret of the town's appeal. And he has come very close to success.

I like, for example, the way he emphasises the extraordinary intensity of the light in Brighton: ''The light deluged the creamy buildings,'' he writes, and the metaphor is

perfect. The book evokes the poignant world of former actors, those who were once successful, and those who never succeeded, who sit at the bar of every old-fashioned Brighton pub. He notes the oddity of the fully-dressed and the stark naked sitting together talking on the nudist beach.

He is shakiest when he tries to come to terms with Brighton's gay world, which he insists on seeing as simultaneously far more glamorous and far seedier than it actually is. His attempt to reconstruct the life story of a gay acquaintance is over-written to the point of cringe-making.

Richardson uses Brighton as the starting point for a number of such digressions, and this is the book's greatest weakness, since they are not equally interesting. Less whimsy, more self-discipline, would have given the book a sharper edge.

His other weakness is that he is far too indulgent of the town. Working fishermen, he says,

are ''the only issue on which Brightonians seem small-minded''. He wouldn't have written that if he'd studied the correspondence page of the local daily. There's

a streak of vicious xenophobia in Brighton, and a rudeness towards strangers which he seems not to notice. But then, he is writing from the point of view of a Londoner.