Hello mate,
Yep it's that old "my old TV can't handle that" line ... USA/JAP formats are NTSC UK's is PAL ... you knew that already though ...
If you had a Video that could cope with Dual Video Formats then you could go through that then onto the TV ... video players are cheap these days & you might get one thats cheap enough or second hand out the papers ... try it first though ... other than that you could try getting hold of a Format Converter that would convert NTSC to PAL & vise versa ...
cheers
Gem