I bought Firefly and Serenity DVDs when they came out, if you haven't seen it then I recommend that you do. It's odd (wild west meets battlestar galactica odd ) but fun
I'm Freeview too (though thinking of getting a TV/phone/broadband package from Mr Branson).
I have an internet buddy in Aberdeen (prolly under six feet of snow at the moment) who "manages" <cough> to get Castle and Bones from a mate in the States.
He then does things technical, and puts them onto DVD for me, and every so often, DVDs land on my doormat!
The thing with this is, that his mate records them from US telly, somehow Zips them down to smaller size, emails them to Aberdeen, where my mate then does something terribly technical with some terribly technical bit of software, AND THEN, he edits out all the commercial breaks.
I have the completely set of The Big Bang Theory by a similar process but i didn't bother to convert for DVD and kept them as .AVI files which i can play on the telly through a cool little box i have.