Paul Golder writes for the Brentwood Gazette

Exciting times in the studio last week for our many listeners who also support West Ham United, as we welcomed Hammers legend Julian Dicks to the studio.

Julian spent ten seasons at West Ham between 1988 and 1999, and was a fans’ favourite having been voted Hammer Of The Year four times. Unusually for a defender, he scored 64 goals in that time, mainly due to his ferocious and accurate penalty-taking.

Julian had a lot of stories to tell and after the show was finished the presenting team took him into our off-air studio and recorded many more stories, which allowed us to publish an interview lasting over two and a half hours – not bad for a one hour radio show!

It was our longest one to date and hopefully will push listener figures higher – the show recently broke the 6,000 barrier for iTunes subscriber numbers and regularly appears in the national sport podcast charts, alongside shows from the BBC, Sky and national newspapers.

As a community station we’ve always covered local teams at grass roots level and our football in particular has been going well – our dedicated Leyton Orient show is also in our top two every week.

I have been trying to get other teams involved in regular programming too, so if anyone thinks we should be featuring their team more, you know what to do …

For those of you who aren’t so keen on football we’ve got lots of other things going on too. Actor Dan Richardson visited Karin Ridgers’ Friday night House Of Fun show last week. Dan is also an animal rights activist and spoke about his work with the Born Free Foundation, of which he is a director.

Karin’s show features on vegan issues and activism and animal rights, a subject which rarely gets covered in depth on other radio stations despite its growing popularity – nearly two million people in the UK now identify as vegan or vegetarian.

* Lots more guests coming up on Phoenix FM in the next seven days. Commonwealth games medallist Elizabeth Cann will be talking about badminton, Penny Hollington will be updating us on the local job market and Jess Kemp will be chatting about the Beeches’ Open House event. And for those interested in cryptocurrency, Girard Newkirk and Tony Tiyou will be trying to unravel it all on air.

* We’ll also be featuring more live music sessions, including visits from The Mighty Fallen and Billy Collins.