right|thumb|Polycarp (portrayed by John Plauché) is swamped by fan mail, 1967.
Polycarp ( in the Cajun French manner) was a fictional character who was a local children's television show host. His program, Polycarp and Pals, was broadcast from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s on KATC Channel 3 in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA.
Background
Polycarp was portrayed by the KATC employee John Plauché (27 July 1932 – June 1978), hired by KATC in May 1963 and who it credited for the show's originality. "It is a land created through the wonderful imagination of John Plauche, who as Polycarp Phillipe Pecot Number 2, makes our lives a little happier, the world a brighter place [in which] to live." (Polycarp often jokingly warned viewers in his Cajun-accented English, "Don’t ask for Number One 'cuz dat's my daddy and dey don't like him anyway.")
An avuncular Cajun dressed in a plaid shirt, waistcoat and crumpled straw hat, Polycarp lived on a houseboat, the Narcisse Number 3, "somewhere way back in the Anse La Butte Swamp midway between the Parishes of Fantaisie and Réalité", as a KATC newsletter put it in 1967. As evidence of this popularity, Polycarp received over 3,000 letters and postcards from local children over a seven-day period during a fall 1967 Halloween costume giveaway promotion. In October that year, the University of Southwestern Louisiana's Alumni Association, Athletic Association and its band named Polycarp the first "Mr. Acadiana", an honor it bestowed annually during the school's homecoming American football game to the USL alumnus who best "fosters the tradition and the ideals of the school and of the area. . . .". (Plauché had graduated from the university in 1957.)
In 1976, the producer J. D. "Jay" Miller of Crowley, Louisiana, issued a 45 rpm record on his Yule Time record label of Polycarp reading "The Night Before Christmas".
right|thumb|Polycarp 45 RPM record, 1976. Note that John Plauché is credited as the recording's writer, although his name is misspelled.
Theme song
Polycarp's eponymous theme song (rendered "Polycarp Phillip Pecot #II" on the 45 rpm record label) was recorded in 1966 by the local swamp pop musician Johnnie Allan to the tune of The McCoys' 1965 Number 1 hit song "Hang On Sloopy".
Broadcast schedule
In spring 1969, Polycarp and Pals was broadcast for one hour each weekday and Saturday beginning at 7am CST (although on some weekdays it ran for an hour and a half, ending at 8:30am). There is some evidence that a short-lived spin-off program, The Polycarp Palace, was broadcast on Tuesdays from 3:30 to 5:50pm beginning in October 1967.