Bill Heine

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Bill Heine is a presenter on BBC Radio Oxford Monday to Friday. In October 2004, he had his time-slot changed from 11am–2pm to 4–7pm to exploit his success with the listeners fully. Considered by many to be very opinionated and perhaps somewhat controversial in the field of radio presenting, Heine is not afraid to speak his mind and allows his listeners to do the same during his phone-in show. With the catchphrase, "There's a line free", just about everything is discussed on his show. Perhaps more uniquely, however, is that a member of the public co-hosts his show for an hour daily, which gives the show a different atmosphere every day.

American-born, Heine has lived in Oxford ever since studying for a postgraduate degree at Balliol College in the late 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s he ran both the Penultimate Picture Palace cinema in East Oxford and the Not the Moulin Rouge Cinema in Headington: he employed the sculptor John Buckley to design a giant pair of hands for the former, and a giant pair of legs for the latter.

Heine employed Buckley again in 1986 to design a 25ft fibreglass sculpture of a shark that appears to be crashing through the roof of his own house in the Headington area of Oxford, and plans to release a book on the subject in the near future; it forms something of a (controversial) local landmark.