Yeah, okay, so I didn’t post yesterday. To make it up to you, allow me to draw your attention to an inspiring tale of triumph against the odds concerning one man’s heroic efforts to bring Joking Apart, a relatively little-known British sitcom, to DVD.

If you’re too lazy to read that article (and I really do urge you to do so), then I can summarise it as follows: man likes sitcom, man wants to see sitcom on DVD, man licenses sitcom himself, man authors DVD himself, man sells DVD to public, everybody wins.

For some reason, what that amazes me the most about the whole thing isn’t the fact that somebody with no previous DVD production experience was able to talk the license-holders into allowing him to produce the disc, nor is it that one man working on his own was responsible for everything (apart from the actual manufacturing of the discs); no, it’s the fact that the DVD has a subtitle track and decent-quality extras: a 20-minute retrospective featurette and commentaries on four of the episodes from most of the main cast and the series’ creator, Steven Moffat (who also created Press Gang and Coupling, and whose most recent work was writing some of the best-received episodes of the 2005/06 series of Doctor Who, namely The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace). Why are these so amazing? Because even “proper” commercial DVDs don’t always have them, ostensibly for cost issues, and yet one man (albeit one with fairly deep pockets, one assumes) was able to do these — of course, it helps that Moffat was willing to participate for free but even so, there’s studio time to book, other participants to pay, and so on.

I’ve never seen Joking Apart (hence the fact that I wasn’t able to use an apposite quote from it for the post title and had to settle on one from a different sitcom instead) but I think I’m going to give it a go; not just because of its creator’s CV but also because there’s always the chance that one of my favourite series might receive the same treatment in future.

So, if ever subtitles need doing on the no-doubt forthcoming Captain Butler DVD, give me a shout!