It was the end of an era at the Town Hall when the council chamber said goodbye to three stalwarts of the elected assembly.

Between them, Councillors Peter Bennett, Bob Clare and Brian Lynn have served the town for almost 90 years and were three of its finest mayors.

All have stuck with their respective parties through thick and thin and will be sadly missed.

The people who replace them after the May 1 elections will certainly have hard acts to follow.

Of course, that is providing anybody actually bothers to vote on election day.

Speaking to activists from both the town's main parties, the big fear is apathy will be the big winner when the ballot boxes are opened at the Assembly Hall shortly after 9pm on election night.

Sometimes it is hard to know what to do to get people out to vote - and it must feel ten times worse if you're wearing a red rosette.

In 1991, Labour believed it had in Jim Deen the right candidate to win Selden ward.

Activists delivered three leaflets and knocked on every door in the area twice, which is almost unheard of for a local election campaign.

Unfortunately, and to the detriment of Worthing because he would have made an excellent councillor, Mr Deen lost and the dream of a sitting Labour member remained just that.

Election defeat then was bad enough but worse has followed.

Twelve years on and Worthing Labour Party is in such disarray it can only find candidates to stand in three wards, Tarring, Central and Marine.

For a party in government, this is hard to believe.

Worthing gets its own commercial radio station next month when Splash FM takes to the airwaves.

Having presented the sports show for six months on Surf 107, now Juice, when that went on air in Brighton in 1998, I hope Splash will have learnt the lessons of Surf.

When starting a radio station there is no point trying to do things on the cheap - it will always cost more in the long run.

Decent presenters come at a price. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys and if monkeys present programmes, the quality drops and listeners switch off.

Without the listening figures, advertisers won't advertise and the programming budget suffers. It's a vicious circle.

Hopefully, Splash will avoid such problems.

Managing director Roy Stannard is an experienced radio man who knows how to do a good job and, more importantly, knows how much it costs.

No doubt he already has an impressive array of advertisers and programme sponsors lined up, although I understand there is no truth in the rumour that Diddy David Hamilton's Saturday night show will be sponsored by Rug Doctor.

In last week's column it was stated I was a police special constable. This was an editing error and I'm keen to assure readers this is not the case.