Many of us have the image of Tísner on his head: that eye patch, that pear-shaped beard, that friendliness. We've seen him in some television interviews, we know he was the brother-in-law of Pere Calders –with whom he had gone into exile in Mexico– and also that he did the crossword puzzle of The Vanguard before Màrius Serra, but... what do we know about Tísner the writer? At most, that he is the author of Words of Opóton the Elder, his best-known novel, an alternate history in which the Aztec emperor Moctezuma conquers Europe; but this is not the only book he wrote.

Fortunately, and to repair the injustice, the publishing house Males Hierbas recovers The Channel 4 survey, the story of a television channel that is also an entire society, locked inside a fourteen-story building, where there's room for conspiracies, unions, love, and the end of the world. It's a totalitarian dystopia, but with humor—a Calderonian humor, tender and ironic, charged with evil intentions and visionary power; in many passages, we have to rub our eyes and remember that Tísner wrote it in 1972! The novel won the Sant Jordi Award, but this was when the Sant Jordi Award wasn't yet a commercial dystopia.

One of the most legendary films about the workings of television studios is Network, by Sidney Lumet. That agitation, that frantic pace, and that lack of scruples come to mind when reading The Channel 4 survey, which draws heavily on the author's authentic experience: Tísner worked for years as a set designer for a Mexican television channel, at a time when television was becoming the great mass medium that would dominate the West during the 20th century. The entire novel is full of references to Mexican society, and it goes without saying that it also acts as a metaphor for Catalan society, stifled by Franco's regime. The Channel 4 skyscraper is a world that functions like a dictatorship where life also makes its way, stubborn and resilient: there are obedient citizens, citizens on the run, and citizens who conspire, and there are some who must conduct a series of interviews to discover what the mysterious Trayecto is, a kind of secret society in which everyone is a companion. We are in an era when there were still utopias; this must be put into context.

On each floor there is a department: makeup, hair, sound, administration, as well as cars with drivers in the basement parking lots and apartments with gardens and supermarkets that make up small cities. Each chapter is led by a different voice, either that of the interviewer or that of the interviewees, who paint the picture so that the reader can get an idea of what this world is and what the Journey is that wants to blow it up. In addition, from time to time there are some paragraphs written on the sidelines of the main pages that tell another story, a hypotext that ends up being a hypertext and that drives the whole point home a bit.

In many moments, reading is a feast: some character names unheard of for a reader today, a rich vocabulary, from when Catalan was not yet a subsidiary language, and there are the theirWhy don't they come back? theirWe would be so happy! At some points, the series of interviews may become a little long, and today's readers may express discomfort with some aspects, such as the treatment of women or homosexuals, which is humiliating and botched, but that, fortunately, is only a fossil, a snail's shell trapped in a rock. The important thing, what remains after reading this novel with such a powerful foresight, is the feeling of holding in our hands a precious link in Catalan literary heritage, a fragment of the entire map that had been withheld from us, and that can contribute to drawing a different map than the one we've been sold, and to reinforcing the certainty that yes, there are references on the table.