Spurs in full cry here.

Lonella! Welcome, well, well worth the wait.

Welcome, listeners, to a bonus episode of The X-Stinch.

My name is Wendy, and I'm joined by a television writer, no less, and not just a television writer,

the writer of the incredible BBC series, Giri Haji, and more importantly, a Spurs fan, Joe Barton, hello, Joe.

Hello, mate.

Joe, we've got loads to talk about the show, obviously, how you got into Spurs, how you

became a writer, and your feelings on Spurs so far this season.

But let's start with Giri Haji. I read that this

idea first came to you when someone you knew sat in a class with a 40-year-old Japanese policeman.

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. It's my girlfriend. And it was about seven years ago. She was doing

a master's in crime science uh at ucel um

forensic no forensic crime science sort of crime scene stuff and um yeah it's an interesting course

and she came back on her first day and i was just sort of asking her how it was um and if she'd

made any friends like that and she was telling me about it,

and she was saying that the class is mostly sort of people in their mid-20s,

like she was then,

and apart from this one middle-aged Japanese man,

who was sitting at the back by himself,

sort of looking quite conservative and slightly out of place

amongst all the mid-20s people.

And it turned out he was a detective from Tokyo that had been sent over to do a, I guess,

...