My first dirty weekend in Brighton consisted of two rather awkward nights in the dubious splendour of the Grand Hotel, possibly the least sexy establishment in Britain. Dirty weekends are for corrupting your secretary, if he's good looking, your tennis coach, or any other unsuitable individual whose attractions reside primarily below the waist. The Grand is a gerontophile's paradise, so if pensioners in leisure wear gloomily grinding their dentures through stale scones fail to arouse, I can't recommend it.
'Unsuitable' and I gamely ate fish and chips on the pier, wandered around the Pavilion and ended up in excruciating silence looking at shoes in LK Bennett. Somehow the fact that we were supposed, even obliged, to have orgiastic sex put me right off, or maybe it was the fact that it's hard to achieve orgasm in a room with such noisome curtains.
There's something uniquely English about the concept of the dirty weekend. The French and Italians don't even have a word for it, but then they've never felt the need to decamp to the seaside for a bit of extracurricular. My American friends quite sweetly think it is something to do with sports. I wonder whether the Empire wasn't sustained through the British ability to impose mannered order on the fearsome unknown - as with India, so with Brighton, which we had to invent because we're terrified of sex.
In his book Breakfast in Brighton, Nigel Richardson posits our very own Sodom-on-Sea as 'the antithesis of England', but Brighton couldn't exist anywhere else. In its heyday, Brighton may have been the genius loci of sexual, sartorial and culinary excess, but there remains something peculiarly British about its ritualisation of the forbidden. A whiff of sea air and battered cod and we are free to cast off our inhibitions along with our raincoats and frolic on the shores of delight, or so the theory goes.
Brighton invented the dirty weekend, or rather the Prince Regent invented it in Brighton. Sex and death have always been the city's business. Its popularity as a health resort allowed vice to play a politely hypocritical homage to virtue in maintaining the fiction that people went there to get better. But there's no money in TB these days, and in an attempt to continue luring Londoners to 'Piccadilly on Sea', Brighton appears to be concentrating a little too hard on what it has always done best.
Fearing a repeat of the last fiasco, I took no chances and invited my man to the Hotel Pelirocco, which casts itself as the ultimate dirty weekend experience. Our room was called Pussy; it was indeed very pink. He was sulking because he couldn't understand why anyone would want to go to the English seaside ever, let alone in winter. Why couldn't I have chosen somewhere like Syracuse?
'Stop whining,' I said briskly. 'Look, we have a sea view!' He snarled in that way of his that until recently had made me feel wobbly and pressed his nose to the bay window. The horizon looked Siberian.
To try to defrost things I picked up the Nookkii-sponsored 'Something for the Weekend Menu' but he took it as an insult to his manhood. You have to know a guy well before you start ordering up Dinky Diggler vibrators, so I suggested a box of silk rose petals and tealights for bathtime romps, but he reasonably observed that there was no bath.
While the rooms at the Pelirocco pay homage to every benighted cliché of postmodern kitsch, the bathrooms are strictly Travelodge. The hotel's crashing suggestiveness is less of a nudge and a wink than a right hook and a black eye.
My man's reaction to Brighton passed swiftly from amusement to pity. Do the English really need all this encouragement just to get laid? Apparently a brisk walk on the prom is no longer enough to get our jaded juices flowing. Yet lap-dancing lessons and beds fitted with 'shackles for sexy shenanigans' have taken the poetry out of Brighton.
I've always imagined that beneath the hectic hedonism of its summer crowds lies a darker, more potent eroticism, that of the bitter anti-romance of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.
Just as the city's superficial elegance is juxtaposed with the slowly shifting decay of its jerry-built terraces, so its gaiety has always been sweetly poisoned with the breath of mortality. What better emblem for post-coital tristesse than a lilting city sliding softly into the sea?
You can't fake infidelity. It used to be one of the chief pleasures of marriage. It still arouses genuine moral indignation - or at least spices prurience with outrage (ask Boris Johnson). But a dirty weekend in Brighton now implies that you can have all the fun and none of the guilt, without realising that this was precisely the point.
By taking away the element of sin and replacing it with sleaze-for-all, Brighton has betrayed its louche, raffish qualities. Aubrey Beardsley holidayed here at about the time Oscar Wilde hinted at Brighton's qualities as a gay haven in The Importance of Being Earnest, and between the perversities of the fin-de-siècle imagination and tatty online 'Dirty Weekend' kits, something has been lost.
Exhibitionism has become banal, reducing what was furtive and deliciously wicked to a tourist attraction, as anaesthetic and unaesthetic as Amsterdam's red-light district. Dishonesty and betrayal were what lent Brighton its poignant sexiness, the doomed snatch at paradise mirrored by the hollow-cheeked invalids hacking gobbets of their lungs onto its once pristine beaches.
My Death in Venice musings were interrupted by my man's gleeful discovery that the Pelirocco provides PlayStations. At least he had a good time. The hotel's heart is in the right place, but it needs to work on the details. Individual kettles are more bedsit than shag pad, and I defy anyone to feel saucy to the explosive soundtrack of 'Grand Theft Auto'. I'd invested in some splendid new knickers, but I left them draped forlornly over the bedpost and went for a walk in the Lanes.
Nowhere that tries this hard can ever be cool but the city of Brighton and Hove has become terribly smart of late. The dread word 'vibrant' appears in a depressing number of brochures, and long-time residents complain that the city has become too metrosexual for its own good. One senses that nothing so vulgar as the Pavilion would be allowed nowadays.
Taking the train down to Brighton just doesn't feel bad any more. Increasingly, the place feels like some hideous soft-porn Center Parc, sanitised and ultimately sexless.
My favourite Brighton celebrity, Julie Burchill, described it as looking like 'a town recovering from a multiple orgasm'. Brighton may be recuperating from its past, but if it wants to hang on to a future as England's naughtiest destination, it needs to dirty up its act.
· Hotel Pelirocco 10 Regency Square, Brighton (01273 327055; hotelpelirocco.co.uk). Double rooms £95-£120 per night on weekdays, £105-£140 at weekends.
Perfectly dirty hotels for lovers
The Garden Shed, Star Inn, Harome, Yorkshire (01439 770397; thestaratharome.co.uk) Privacy is guaranteed in this cosy, detached, country cottage with exposed timbers, flagstones and a spa bath big enough for two. Room service and a breakfast hamper come from the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Star Inn so you need never leave your room until check-out. From £120 per night.
The Hotel du Vin, Bristol (0117 925 5577; hotelduvin.com) Soaking in a bath big enough for two is just one of the treats in store at this converted warehouse. A fabulous bistro, awesome wine list, enveloping sofas and a cigar bar are some more. Doubles from £120.
Tor Cottage, Chillaton, nr Tavistock, Devon (01822 860248; torcottage.co.uk) Staying at Tor Cottage is like inhabiting a secret garden - you get to the little woodland house called Laughing Waters by way of a winding path. A hammock slung from trees and a gypsy caravan complete the fantasy. Minimum stay two nights; £140 per night.
The Portobello Hotel, London (020 7727 2777; portobello-hotel.co.uk) This is the daddy and still the best. Choose the room with a round bed and gauzy drapes and huge, bedside, roll-top, cast-iron bath that you can fill with champagne, à la Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, if you so desire. Rouse yourselves for dinner round the corner at the celebrated Julie's. Doubles from £160.
