Well what I did when I was checking a few names, was to check the whois for that name. Most of the time, I would see that the expiration date was a few years away. However, one name that I had my eye on, and subsequently managed to register was tvip.tv
From the whois, I saw that it was in redemption period, and after about two to three weeks, I noticed that the status changed to pending delete. That gave me the hope that the name was gonna drop. After checking the status a few times a day, I finally found that it was free to reg - and I did just that.
Don't know if that is gonna be much help, as its a lot of manual work, but if there is another quicker way, I would really like to hear about it as well.
Alex