Which Companion is the BBC treating us like this year?

A while back I complained that the BBC's parochial attitude that was making Neil Gaiman furtively obtain Doctor Who - expat fans were being treated like Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace, only getting the Doctor on DVD, after waiting long enough to die.

They solved this problem for Neil by having him write The Doctor's Wife, so he gets to carry round the series on a flash key. It almost seemed like the BBC got the message, boasting in the New York Times that the US premiere will not be delayed. But that was like the promise to Amelia Pond that they'd be right back, while we pay iTunes or Amazon for the new series, and are left sitting on our suitcase in our nightie and wellies, while nothing downloads for us.

Instead, because they fret archaically about TV ratings, we're supposed to wait 13 hours after the UK sees it, and then, like Rose in Journey's End, we're stuck in a parallel universe with a pale imitation of the Doctor - BBC America's letterboxed, pillarboxed, advertisement-infested, scenes-cut-for-time version that I truly hope Steven Moffat, Russell Davies, Neil Gaiman, and everyone else who worked so hard to imagine these adventures for us, never gets to see. It's like the Dream Lord from Amy's Choice seized control of the Tardis from us.

So what can we do? We can be like River Song in the Impossible Astronaut, and fly the Tardis properly, sweetly warn of spoilers, and get the episode from BitTorrent instead.

If the BBC were smart about this, they'd offer the diehard fans a pay-to-download package that started downloading during the UK première TV showing. If they were even smarter they'd charge a super premium to get access the same time they do the press previews the week before.

RIP Elisabeth Sladen, like us fans in the 90s, dropped off in the wrong place, with just memories and a bad robot dog to keep us going, but we held out hope and saw the Doctor again.

Stardust - best movie of the year

Before I go into details, let me say that you should go and see Stardust tomorrow. Take friends and loved ones; you'll thank me for it later.

We watched Edward Scissorhands in San Jose's St James Park on Friday night, which has a magic realism of it's own, what with the light rail passing either side of the park, the planes and nightclub searchlights in the sky, and the audience mixing the homeless who sleep in the park with a throng of our friends picnicking. I called Edward Scissorhands a geek parable before, but its screenwriter Caroline Thompson describes it as a fable - a story you know isn't true but care about anyway. It takes a fantastic character and brings him into the mundane world to try to cope.

Stardust is in some ways the opposite of this - Tristan escapes from his conforming world to a fantastic one, a world of danger that tests him. That he can't resist returning to show himself off is a pivotal moment in the plot; the world of Stronghold has a very sharply drawn medieval conflict over succession, that echoes and parodies many we have seen. Tristan's lovestruck quest is pithily skewered by Yvaine, the star who is its object. It is a picaresque story, but Vaughn brings some of the English subcultural texture from Snatch and Layer Cake to it too, with archetypically English small time crooks and fences represented.

What is different from those works, and which owes more to Gaiman than Vaughn, is the underlying morality of the story. I have been strongly impressed by this current within British fantasy work recently - the revived Doctor Who is exemplary this way, as is the Dangerous Book for Boys, and even Christopher Hitchens can see it in Harry Potter.

In each case there is an acknowledgment that there is evil in the world, but a consistent message that it is best fought through love, through integrity and through striving to transcend our recognised flaws. Though secular in tone and style they echo for me the sublimated Anglicanism of Lewis and Tolkein; doing the right thing for the sake of this world, not the next.