That Bill Heine liked to party was a feature of his character highlighted by many of those paying the warm and deservedly generous tributes that followed his death last week.

It was a trait that naturally endeared him to those of likewise disposition, among whom I am not unwilling – denial would be foolish – to include myself.

Our paths crossed over the years at many events both private – we had a lot of friends in common – and public. Each with an interest in matters cultural and gastronomic, we were ever likely to find ourselves at the same PR-led ‘dos’ that proliferate in these fields. And when we did, this inevitably added – for me at least – to the fun.

Bill and I went back a very long way as pals, as far back, in fact, as the legendarily long summer of 1976 when teaser posters began appearing on lampposts in East Oxford to advise us “The PPP is coming”.

A little research revealed that this referred to the imminent opening – actually reopening – by Bill and business partner Pablo Butcher of a Jeune Street cinema now to be styled the Penultimate Picture Palace.

Bill told me how the name arose at our first meeting, our first interview, at his riverside home in Dorchester.

“When I told the bank manager what I was doing, he said this wasn’t quite the worst business idea he had heard, but the penultimate in duds. We had the name.”

Bill told me of some other unusual features of the cinema-to-come, including Mae West lips as door handles and the Al Jolson jazz hands above the entrance – both the work of sculptor John Buckley – and loos labelled Pearl and Dean.

All were duly delivered, and of course made great copy of the sort that Bill was to go on providing again and again in the years ahead.

Happily, I became the go-to journalist for his disclosures, which usually involved something mischievous or wacky, a ban-defying showing, for instance of A Clockwork Orange, for which the PPP was obliged to become a club, or the high-kicking can-can dancing legs (John Buckley again) at Bill’s other cinema, Not the Moulin Rouge, in Headington.

But these were as naught when measured against the other modification to the streetscape of New High Street that Bill and John had in mind . . .

The great and glorious joke that was the shark was known to me – as to very few others – in advance of its devastating first appearance.

Bill proposed lunch together one Thursday in the sunny garden of The Abingdon Arms, in Beckley, at which he produced for my inspection John’s brilliant pen-and-ink study of what was to descend on this unsuspecting neighbourhood on the Saturday morning following.

I have this before me as I write, revealing very clearly in its labelling the shark’s status as a work of art that Bill would stress during all the planning wrangles that lay ahead.

There is its oft-forgotten title, “Untitled, 1986”, and the definition of what it was to be: “Mixed Media: fibreglass, bricks, mortar, flowers, curtains, people . . .”

And at dawn that Saturday, August 9, 1986, the fish duly appeared, to feature in startling images soon flashed around the world.

The first arrived at the Oxford Mail more than an hour before my phoned-over story of what it was all about. This caused a flurry of concern from the duty editor of the day, a man rather given to such fits.

I explained that the scale of the story was obvious – of course it led the paper – that there were rather a lot of people to speak to, and that I was at least an hour inside deadline. In short, calm down.

It turns out that this very man, the late Bernard Conolly by name, has good reason to be considered the godfather of Bill’s radio career.

The story – complete news to me – was told last Wednesday by the BBC Radio Oxford broadcaster Mark Young in the hour-long tribute programme to Bill put out by the station.

He explained that the powers-that-be wanted a phone-in show for which Bernard, who wrote an acerbic weekly column for the Oxford Mail, was judged ideal.

He proved not to be well-suited to the airwaves, however, and it was decided to turn to Bill, who had a controversial column of his own in the Oxford Star, our now defunct freesheet. The rest is history.

Mention of the column reminds me to draw an unlikely comparison between Bill and Boris Johnson.

A one-time colleague of mine had charge of the op-ed pages on the Daily Telegraph for which Boris’s Monday musings were traditionally delivered some time after the presses should have rolled. Cue much tearing out of hair.

Bill, too, regularly tried the patience of the editor with the non-appearance of his copy until, at the very last minute, it would be phoned in, sometimes from a far-flung corner of the world.

It always came though, for Bill – despite efforts sometimes to suggest the contrary – was a true professional and, for a lucky many, a true friend.