Ali, a Turkish Cypriot, runs Bridge Street Café in Walford with his wife, Sue Osman (Sandy Ratcliff), and also drives a taxicab.

He is a gambler and frequently holds poker games in the café after closing time and wages bets at the bookies, which is a huge source of concern for Sue.

In doing so, he runs up huge gambling debts to Joanne Francis (Pamela Salem), manager of Strokes wine bar, also a member of the criminal underworld known as The Firm.

Ali Osman was one of the original twenty-three characters invented by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith.

Ali was a well-intentioned attempt to represent the proportion of Turkish Cypriots who had immigrated to England and settled in the East End of London.

Even though the ethnic minority groups were deemed the hardest to research, Holland and Smith called upon their contacts to relay information about their origins and lifestyles and were then able to portray Walford's most recent immigrants more realistically.

[1] Ali's original character outline as written by Smith and Holland appeared in an abridged form in their book, EastEnders: The Inside Story.

He felt Salih did not have the physical presence needed and also believed that Sandy Ratcliff (the actress playing his on-screen wife) would "make mincemeat out of him".

Ironically, both actors eventually featured in the series, as Bilinger was brought back to take on the role of Ali's older brother.

[1] Peter Batt, one of EastEnders' original scriptwriters, has alleged that he created the character of Ali, and that he was based on himself: "a lunatic fucking gambler".

During this time in the 1980s, the issue of cot death was extremely prominent in the British press, partly due to an increase in casualties, but also because a doctor had gone public with the accusation that parents were to blame for the tragic occurrence.

After the storyline aired in June 1985, the show was praised by audience and press alike for the sensitive and unsensational way this harrowing subject was treated.

The sudden tragedy came as a surprise to the audience, especially since the bereaved parents were a couple whose feuding, fighting ways had made them appear rather comic in the early episodes of the show.

[3] The character of Ali lasted in the show for over four years, remaining after the mental breakdown of his highly strung wife and depicting the plight of a single-parent father.

[5] In 2020, Sara Wallis and Ian Hyland from The Daily Mirror placed Ali 92nd on their ranked list of the best EastEnders characters of all time and commented that his gambling "ruined" his "rocky" marriage to Sue.