These weren’t the only occasions that Mr Heine battled with city councillors. He was often in conflict with them for showing banned and provocative films at his other cinema, the Penultimate Picture Palace in Jeune Street, East Oxford. The PPP, as it was known, was also adorned - this time with a giant pair of hands, designed, like the shark and the legs, with his friend, sculptor John Buckley. Mr Heine grew up in a small farming community in Illinois in the United States. He came to Oxford in the 1960s to study law at Balliol College, but decided not to go into the profession. Instead, he chose writing “because I thought it would be more interesting,” he said later.