[Humphrey Hacker]

Yeah this probably isn't unique to that show, as its probably a cost revenue ratio thing.  since you can buy blank DVDS for home use in bulk at relatively cheap prices which works out at somewhere around 20-25p a disc, imagine what they cost to buy wholesale and then to actually make - pennies.

Video on the other hand would have been a higher initial cost I would have thought, due to all the parts, the plastic, the tape itself, some method of threading it on the cogs and what not and then mass duplicating from the tape master you've put together (I remember reading the BBC learnt from a Dr Who home video release saga that duplication in real time was the only acceptable solution for mass duplicating of video tape and not whatever they were using before which was quicker, cheaper but poorer picture quality) ...  If you can shave the cost off by cutting a show by an episodes worth, that's probably cheaper than coughing up for another master and another tape.

As mentioned above a lot of 80s and probably early 90s VHS releases would have had the episodes stitched together in one long run.  We had the complete Fawlty Towers collection from I think 1986, which had three episodes together on each tape that all ran into each other, with the credits at the end in a cobbled together fashion.  Its probably good fortune there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers as it slotted nicely into that ideology (13th episode rumours not withstanding).

In a related fashion ABC Australia would stitch together a 2 part episode of "The Bill" into a 90 minute ad-free "telemovie" and use "credit squeeze" to have a modified set of credits at the end.