Anyway... just for giggles I snapped some side by side comparisons.
The first frames are from an old boot DVD version of SotS.
I found it as a torrent on Demonoid, but I believe it was from a website called SongoftheSouth.com or something (don't worry the site is long dead).
It's better than a lot of the versions I've seen and does not have really bad blooming/blurring colors or any hard subbed foreign language. It is 29.97fps interlaced. I tried to grab the cleanest frames.
The second frame is the new BBC broadcast with the odd field discarded and then the half-sized image resized to 480 lines.
You'd think the BBC version would lose out since you are using 288 lines to make 480... you'd be wrong.
Both seem to have a lot of compression artifacts so that can't be weighed in the comparison.
I'll try the uber interlaced idea (as described above), but I think this method will actually turn out a passable progressive version.
The PAL release might look better, but it really contains no more video information than what I've done (since every other field is a blurry composite).