A lot of this depends on the TV schedule, and if the season was filmed before it ran on TV. Some networks will purchase a season in it's completed form. This covers the costs of production and film crew. It's much more expensive to hire a crew for 12 weeks, then for 12 days. So you could film 12 episodes quickly and air them on TV over a weekly schedule to recover costs.
Some shows like Friends become so popular the network can afford a full-time production crew. So they switch from pre-filming seasons to producing shows weekly. Keeping a crew on hand to produce each weekly show. Some shows can have operating costs over $1 million per episode.
Stargate for example ran for 10 years, and resulted in a full-time crew with their own production studio just for filming Stargate. Where as the first season of Terra Nova was all filmed at once, and after it ran it was cancelled.
There are a lot of popular British shows that have full-time schedules, but most of what you were watching were less known or popular. As a result, they were likely pre-film in smaller batches.
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