The joys of satellite feeds

The Smoking Gun has BBC footage of President Bush getting his hair combed before his speech on Wednesday here.

This is old news to someone who has a large satellite dish. You can see more of this sort of thing in the documentary Feed , in which various politicians blow their noses and joke around before they start to speak live by satellite.

Many years ago, during the O.J. Simpson trial, my parents and I lucked onto a rogue feed from a balcony which featured a freelance TV reporter doing a series of interviews on the day's events in the trial for TV stations around the country. We saw him fiddling with his hair, getting bored, and doing stuff, like scratching his nose, that you wouldn't want to see anyone doing on TV. His cameraman, waiting for a producer to give him a signal, checked his camera by focusing on a fly buzzing around a Pest Strip.