If, like the Poorhouse, you are blessed with a nice slightly old-skool Daewoo DVD9000 S5 DVD player or similar you can easily enough get around the "region" restrictions on it. Yay. DVDs are coded to certain regions; perhaps the most relevant here being Region 1 = America, Region 2 = UK. A DVD player will only play the specific region's DVDs it is set to, presumably to stop UK importing cheap / early release US DVDs and the like. Boo.

However, if you have this specific DVD player you can remove this silliness as below."

1. Turn player on, no disc needed.
2. Press Setup on the remote to get to the setup menu.
3. Don't choose anything, but rather type the following sequence on the remote: 1 3 7 9 8 8 8 8.
4. A brand spanking new menu called Version will appear. Use the down arrow to move to it and press Play to access it.
5. You enter a menu regarding the DVD player's region. Use up and down to select your preferred region, or choose 0 to (I think) allow any region's DVDs to play
6. Press Setup again to get out of the menus.

Horray, digital freedom. Thanks to DVD Reviewer for that tit-bit of useful information. If you have a different DVD player but would still like to try and change or remove its region restrictions, check out their Multi-region hacks section for info on sorting many, many other DVD models.