An element of absurdity was never far away: with the assistance of viewer-workers, he built houses from ice in Southern California and, in 1970, constructed a wall of bread with jelly as mortar near the Berlin Wall.
While predominantly attracting positive comments, footage of Sue Austin in her underwater wheelchair on YouTube also draws unpleasant negatives: "It's bad enough people in wheelchairs are too lazy to walk, but now they're even too lazy to float through water without motor assistance?" wrote one viewer.
The popular Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty received significant US government assistance and left many viewers with the impression that torture led inexorably to the death of Osama bin Laden.
But when Mr Bush was asked what he would say to someone who had just lost his job to outsourcing, he talked about "trade-adjustment assistance", which fewer than one viewer in a thousand understands, and then turned to education.
David Scott, chief executive of Digital UK, the body set up to oversee switchover, said: "I welcome [the] announcement by the Switchover Help Scheme, which provides a vital safety net for eligible viewers who need assistance making the transition to digital television.
How one views Fatal Assistance, depends upon prior knowledge the viewer brings to the film.
We thank Andreas Albersmeier for assistance with promoter search and Rolf Hilker and Alexander Goesmann for the supply of the RNAseq transcriptome viewer ReadXplorer (Hilker et al., in preparation).
As each of us spoke, the viewers were responding and we picked up on those responses with assistance from our own online students who were monitoring the communications.
"If it wasn't for Steve Knight's assistance in this thing, I guarantee you I'd be dead," Brayton tells viewers in the 30-second ad.
As viewers, they argue, our instinct is to assume that all forms of assistance are equally effective, or that they do what they claim in the first place.
I applaud efforts to provide more technical assistance to our local producers and hope this will mean more and better programming for the public access viewer.
