Disagree.
VPN is the way to do it. All the common proxies; ISA (which sucks donkey balls) and Squid (which is otherwise superb); give away tell-tale signs which can be filtered. VPNs not so.
Either way, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Any free proxies (usually misconfigured and having very short shelf-lives) will be battered by internet scumbags trying to cover their tracks and hence unable to support the bandwidth requirements of things like iPlayer.
Just put your hand in your pocket and be done with it. You get what you pay for.