Three weeks after America was supposed to have elected a president, the TV cameras spend all day tracking a yellow rented van driving along a Florida highway. Everyone is reminded of the day the TV helicopters followed O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco.

The yellow van is stuffed with used ballots for Al Gore and George Bush on their way to yet another recount, this time in Tallahassee, the sleepy Florida capital. O.J., who now lives in Florida, thought the rented van odyssey was "boring" compared with his wild ride on the Los Angeles freeways. But nothing about this election is boring.

"The story has everything. It's the last few seconds of a basketball game, a soap opera and a historical drama rolled into one" is how Tim Russert, of NBC's Meet the Press puts it.

"It doesn't get better than this," says Steve Friedman, producer of CBS's morning news programme. "Every time you think the story is over, it takes another turn. It's like going to see Les Miserables. You keep thinking every song is the last and then they sing another song."

The media are in heaven. Cartoonists, late-night comics, satirical shows, radio DJs columnists, even foreign correspondents are wallowing in the surreal postelection world.

It could hardly get more surreal than TV's coverage of the humble rented truck's 450-mile drive from Palm Beach to Tallahassee. "Pack 'em up and ship 'em up," Judge Sanders Sauls had ordered.

Driver Tony Enos got his eight hours of fame as the cameras gave close-ups of him refilling his tank at pit stops and reporters asked breathlessly how he prepared for this mission which could decide the next president. "Plenty of water and had a good night's sleep, and that's about it."

"The ballots seem to be riding fine back there," Mr Enos assured the reporters writing the first draft of history.

And apart from Mr Enos, we are getting to know other interesting people. Who had heard of Katherine Harris until, as Florida Secretary of State, she certified George Bush as the next President of the United States?

The citrus fruit heiress worth millions has got rough handling. With her sharp features and large mouth, she quickly got nicknamed Cruella de Vil after the baddie in the film, 101 Dalmatians.

But then Robin Givhan, the fashion correspondent of the Washington Post was unleashed.

On election night, Harris was "tired and tousled and like a 40-something woman who hadn't gotten enough sleep". But for her next TV appearance she was "suited up for business", wrote Ms Givhan. "Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick - the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on shirt collars. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat."

It's tough when you are a woman caught in the most vicious political dogfight in more than a century.

Judge Sanders Sauls, who is hearing the Gore appeal in a Florida circuit court, gets off lightly to be described as a "bald bespectacled jurist". Not a word about his make-up. His "folksy humour" goes down well as when he tells the lawyers that dealing with their flood of memos and briefs is "a little like getting nibbled to death by a duck."

Then like old gun-slingers, James Baker and Warren Christopher - both former Secretaries of State - are back to throw their weight behind Bush and Gore. Baker is the tough Texan lawyer and ex-Marine who worked for Bush senior in the White House. He later jeered at President Clinton for having "hosted a representative of the IRA in the White House just before the resumption of terrorist bombing in Britain."

Christopher is the pin-striped, California attorney who advised Bill Clinton on his way to the White House and ran his foreign policy for the first four years. He achieved dubious fame during one of his stopovers at Shannon when he asked for a Gaelic Coffee "decaf and without the whiskey."

The scribes are chortling that "normally Warren Christopher and James Baker 111 wouldn't be caught dead in Tallahassee and now they're fighting over cold rubber French toast at the Motel 6 breakfast buffet."

The clumsy way the Gore and Bush handlers are trying to show their man is the most "presidential" is at times pathetic. The Gore family playing touch football on the front lawn of the vice-presidential mansion trying to evoke Camelot and Kennedy glamour was rightly derided.

Bush pretending to have a consultation with advisers in an Oval Office-type setting in Austin, Texas, was equally sneered at. He soon retired to his ranch, leaving much of the hard work to running mate Dick Cheney in spite of his heart attack.

Counting the flags has become a pastime for political watchers. Gore went on TV this week against a backdrop of a wall of Stars and Stripes. This followed an appearance by Cheney in front of at least six American flags.

The Saturday Night Live TV satirical programme has been merciless towards the presidential contenders since their debates in the run-up to the election. The actor sending up Gore's bullying attitude in the first debate was so good that his advisers made the candidate watch it on video. But this made Gore too obsequious in the second debate.

Bush's notorious malapropisms are also savagely satirised as when he announces "I am Victorian". Now the scriptwriters are portraying an Odd Couple White House where Bush and Gore live affectionately together arguing over the contents of the fridge.

If this doesn't end soon, we really will believe we're watching soap, not the election of the 43rd President of the United States.