in which I shake my fist at DVD regions

One of the problems with the automatic amazon linkie thingie in my post about My Family and Other Animals is that both the American and the Canadian shops took you to different editions than the one I like.

I like the one with ISBN 0246132450. It was published by Grafton in 1987 and is an oversized hardcover, with a nice clear large font, some lovely old photographs of Durrell's family tucked into the text, and full page watercolor illustrations by Peter Barrett. The pages are thick and glossy, the binding is sewn, it opens flat nicely as your read. It's just a lovely edition, unlike some of the quick, whiz bang editions:  'let's republish this thing, it always sells well, print it on recycled toilet paper and stick a token photo of the author on the back' editions; yay! easy money!'

So there you go. If you want a nice edition, hunt that one. You'll need to go used, but it's worth it IMO. Search around on abebooks.com and there are a # of good copies with dust jackets available.

While I was looking up this edition, I discovered that in addition to the Masterpiece Theater adaptation which I mentioned in my previous post, there is a newer  250 minute BBC version which got rave reviews. In fact, in some of the reviews people  mentioned being relieved at how much better it was than the Imelda Staunton version which I adore! Shock.

I immediately said: I must have this! I must watch this! I must see if it's better!

And then I discovered that there is no North American edition. The BBC America shop doesn't have it. The BBC Canada shop doesn't have it. Zip doesn't have it. Amazon.com or .ca don't have it. It appers to not exist.

I could order it from the UK. Here it is. But since I don't have a Region 2 (or a region free) DVD player, I'm stumped.

This is the fist shaking part. WHY do they do this? What possible business sense does it make? Is it just to frustrate people?

So here I am, shaking my fist & yearning for a British DVD. If you have brilliant solutions, let me know.