Initially making his mark as a critic at The Observer, he praised John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent.

An opponent of theatre censorship, he was the first person to deliberately say the word "fuck" during a live television broadcast in 1965, although Miriam Margolyes had earlier used the expletive accidentally.

During a school debate on the motion "This House Thinks the Present Generation Has Lost the Ability to Entertain Itself", Tynan gave a speech on the pleasures of masturbation.

The writer Paul Johnson, "an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen lodge", described Tynan as a "tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum-coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring."

[4] Disliked by some, Tynan was an intellectual and social leader among Oxford undergraduates, often made a splash ("during the whole of his time there he was easily the most talked-of person in the city"), had groupies ("a court of young women and admiring dons"), and gave sensational parties sometimes attended by London entertainment celebrities, Johnson wrote.

[4] Tynan produced and acted in plays, spoke "brilliantly" at the Oxford Union, wrote for and edited college magazines.

[4] He retained a lifelong admiration for his tutor at Oxford, C. S. Lewis; in spite of their marked differences in outlook, Tynan viewed him as a father figure.

[6] When Tynan was called up for National Service, he put on an act of appearing outrageously camp, including wearing a floppy hat, velvet coat, painted fingernails and a great deal of Yardley scent.

Tynan was highly critical of what he called "the Loamshire play", a genre of English country house drama he felt dominated the early 1950s British stage and was wasting the talents of playwrights and actors.

There was a significant development in the 1955–56 British theatre season during which John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (and Samuel Beckett's English version of his own Waiting for Godot) premiered.

Tynan championed Osborne's play, although he identified some possible flaws, concluding his review with the comment: "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.

Tynan and the actor Harold Lang co-wrote a radio play, The Quest for Corbett (1956), which was broadcast at least twice in the BBC Third Programme in the mid-1950s.

[11] Tynan commissioned a film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies from Nigel Kneale, but Ealing Studios closed in 1959 before it could be produced.

Dundy wrote in her memoir Life Itself (2002): "To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction.

Tynan had been highly dismissive of Olivier's achievements as artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, which opened in 1962, but he recommended himself for the role of literary manager.

[citation needed] On 13 November 1965, Tynan participated in a live TV debate, broadcast as part of the BBC's late-night satirical show BBC-3.

At the time, this was believed to be the first time the word "fuck" had been spoken on British television[15]—although at least three prior claims have been asserted: Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although his drunken slurring was not understood); an anonymous man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's magazine show, Roundabout, that his job was "fucking boring";[15] and the actress Miriam Margolyes, who claims to have used the word in frustration while appearing on University Challenge in 1963.

[16] Johnson later called Tynan's use of the word "his masterpiece of calculated self-publicity", adding, "for a time it made him the most notorious man in the country".

Mary Whitehouse, a frequent critic of the BBC over issues of "morals and decency", wrote a letter to the Queen, suggesting that Tynan should be reprimanded by having "his bottom spanked".

[citation needed] Tynan's left-wing politics and lifestyle made him something of a poster boy for 1960s radical chic and champagne socialism in London.

In that same year, he returned to his childhood habit of keeping a journal, detailing his last few months at the National Theatre Company, which he finally left at the end of 1973 after being outmanoeuvred by its new artistic director, Peter Hall.

His attempts to compile an anthology of masturbation fantasies foundered after being rebuffed by Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett and others, and he couldn't raise enough money to finance a film about a sexual triangle.

Tynan's diaries, which he continued until the end of his life, are a mixture of self-examination and gossip, frequently hilarious and passionate, filled with wisdom and occasional folly.

Ultimately, they reflect a growing sense of disappointment, including the observation, "A critic is someone who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

He formed a relationship with a woman to enact sado-masochistic fantasies, sometimes involving both of them cross-dressing, sometimes hiring prostitutes as "extras" in elaborate scenes.

Tynan told his wife that he intended to continue with the sessions weekly "although all common sense and reason and kindness and even camaraderie are against it.