Televisionary
La Pochette brand cigarette pouch, made from 100% leatherette and 14K Goldelle, tagline: “You kids KNOCK IT OFF!” This is an ad from Programme 4, a world outside of both time and place.
The product, La Pochette, never existed. Also, in 1972, my mom owned one. She smoked Tareytons. She was co-creator of the tagline. It emerged from a Mom Collective Consciousness, therefore Programme 4 has not violated her intellectual property rights because of course that shit is public domain. I don’t know what non-smoking moms did or said. I don’t know that there were any non-smoking moms.
Programme 4 is created by Rachel Lichtman, alongside a lot of collaborators like Jason and Randy Sklar, Ted Leo, Juliana Hatfield, Tammy Faye Starlite, Aimee Mann, Michael Penn. Those are just the names that jumped out for me but the end credits, all in French, provide a lot more. Go watch its first hour. It’s SCTV with no sketches. TV pilot credit reels for shows from 1966 that never aired. YouTube packages of 70s TV commercials except none of them are real. It’s every city’s local news bumper and every Evening Magazine that ever existed in every city but only the intros and outros. It is entirely fake. It is entirely accurate and satisfying.
You don’t have to be old to appreciate Programme 4, but if you are old enough to have lived through the eras it’s stealing from and repurposing, you’ll likely experience a few disorienting moments and wonder if those nagging feelings are good or bad. It’s dense with detail and specific graphics and community calendars and library music and hotel lobby weekend art sales and MTM typefaces and the mysterious first spouse of Mike Brady. If you know about Jodie Foster’s 1977 French pop singles and Figurines and Jane Asher, then its atmosphere will resonate deeply, because atmosphere is its existential purpose.
The dreamlike ad copy narration is fast and doesn’t hold for the laugh. It smoothly places absurdity on top of absurdity and expects you to luxuriate in the beauty of something you can look at but not touch. It was there and never there and you float through its haze.
Endorsement: when I sent Alonso there, he said, "The answer to the question: 'What do you want your life to look like?'"
