Twelve months on, and the town is featuring in British national newspapers for an entirely different reason — its deference towards disgraced playwright Oscar Wilde.

Everyone with a modicum knowledge of Worthing history will be aware that Wilde penned his famous The Importance of Being Earnest at the former Esplanade Hotel in Brighton Road, in 1894.

And even more people know that, shortly afterwards, Wilde was sentenced to hard labour after being found guilty of gross indecency with a dissolute young aristocrat.

His time in Reading Gaol proved the death of him — literally!

But why all the current fuss after all this time?

Well, it's all down to Worthing historian Chris Hare, who raises the subject of Wilde in Worthing in his newly-published book on the town.

The resulting brouhaha has even raised the question as to whether we should retain the blue plaque commemorating Wilde's creative time in the town, a tribute affixed to the wall of a block of flats where the Esplanade Hotel stood until the early 1960s.

Surely, the council won't have to engage in a retrospective witch-hunt, ditch the plaque and dissociate the town from being "tainted" by such a monster.

There are some who would love this to happen, but Chris does not want to go down this road.

However, he asks in his book, "whether society, even today, would condone a middle-aged man of superior education seducing teenage boys of little education, is surely an open question".

Certainly, Worthing hasn't been shy in celebrating Wilde's works.

For example, last July's Sunny Worthing Arts Group festival featured a walk-tour, "Wilde thing, I love you", and in the previous year it was "A Walk on the Wilde side".

Are we really going to do a complete volte-face, go through The Trials of Oscar Wilde all over again, and then figuratively burn his books and banish his name for perpetuity?

Not a chance, I'm glad to say.

This topic of morality is just as pertinent today as at the turn of the 20th century.

In two months' time, the Secret Desires shop in Rowlands Road, Worthing, will apply (for the fourth time) to be allowed to run a sex shop.

I anticipate a really lively battle on this occasion, especially over directions on the council's own website, which says members "do not have the right to have regard to the morality of sex establishments", and members' approval or disapproval of such establishments is not a matter which can be considered.

Nor, says the council, should straightforward objections on moral grounds carry any weight.

And looking further ahead, if the Commons approves a government-supported move to get lap-dance clubs classed as sex encounter establishments, and thus liable to stricter controls, how soon will Worthing's Liquid Lounge pole dancers be in the firing line?


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