Thanks for your replies. I would have come back to you before but for some reason I don't always receive notifications of postings.
The transfer went straight to disc and there was no tape involved.
I'm a bit confused about the whole interlaced aspect but I don't think it's crucial to the problem. Final Cut allows me to deinterlace the footage and there's a difference in the way it looks afterwards but the problem persists deinterlaced or not. There shouldn't be any pulldown because I shot at 25fps and since I'm in PAL territory this is the speed at which I want to play back.
I'm going to ask him to send me the footage as an image sequence, as suggested, though I assume this will mean uncompressed, ie very large file sizes.
Do you think it's worth asking him to put the footage onto a tape?