Councillor Blighte-Smythe who would, given half a chance, have brought back hanging for poaching and probably the cat o' nine tails for the unemployed. In between these two extremes there were the Principal who hated anything or anyone who upset his leisurely schedule, the Chief Education Officer, who hated the Principal, and finally Mr Squidley, a local builder, for whom Liberal Studies was an anathema and a bloody waste of time when the little blighters ought to have been putting in a good day's work carrying hods of bricks up blooming ladders. All in all the prospect of coping with the Education Committee was a grim one. He would have to handle them tactfully.
But first there was Bilger. He arrived after ten minutes and entered without knocking. 'Well?' he asked sitting down and staring at Wilt angrily.
'I thought we had better have this chat in private,' said Wilt. 'I just wanted to enquire about the film you made with a crocodile. I must say it sounds most enterprising. If only all Liberal Studies lecturers would use the facilities provided by the local authority to such effect...' He left the sentence with a tag end of unspoken approval. Bilger's hostility softened.
'The only way the working classes are going to understand how they're being manipulated by the media is to get them to make films themselves. That's all I do.'
'Quite so,' said Wilt, 'and getting them to film someone buggering a crocodile helps them to develop a proletarian consciousness transcending the false values they've been inculcated with by a capitalist hierarchy?'
'Right, mate,' said Bilger enthusiastically 'Those fucking things are symbols of exploitation.'
'The bourgeoisie biting its conscience off, so to speak.'
'You've said it,' said Bilger, snapping at the bait.
Wilt looked at him in bewilderment. 'And what classes have you done this... er... fieldwork with?'
'Fitters and Turners Two. We got this croc thing in Nott Road and...'
'In Nott Road?' said Wilt, trying to square his knowledge of the street with docile and presumably homosexual crocodiles.
'Well, it's street theatre as well,' said Bilger, warming to his task. 'Half the people who live there need liberating too.'
'I daresay they do, but I wouldn't have thought encouraging them to screw crocodiles was exactly a liberating experience. I suppose as an example of the class struggle...'
'Here,' said Bilger, 'I thought you said you'd seen the film?'
'Not exactly. But news of its controversial content has reached me. Someone said it was almost sub-Bunuel.'
'Really? Well, what we did is we got this toy crocodile, you know, the ones kiddies put pennies in and they get the privilege of a ride on them.'
'A toy crocodile? You mean you didn't actually use a real live one?'
'Of course we bloody didn't. I mean who'd be loony enough to rivet a real fucking crocodile? He might have been bitten.'
'Might?' said Wilt 'I'd have said the odds on any self-respecting crocodile... Anyway, do go on.'
'So one of the lads gets on this plastic toy thing and we film him doing it.'
'Doing it? Let's get this quite straight. Don't you mean buggering it?'
'Sort of,' said Bilger. 'He didn't have his prick out or anything like that. There was nowhere he could have put it. No, all he did was simulate buggering the thing. That way he was symbolically screwing the whole reformist welfare statism of the capitalist system.'
'In the shape of a rocking crocodile?' said Wilt. He leant back in his chair and wondered yet
