In a scene-stealing turn from Will Sharpe, Rodney is full of brio and wit (“I’ll have to ring you back,” he sighs theatrically into his phone when an emotional ex-boyfriend turns up. A half-Japanese young man, Rodney, proves a useful conduit, but Mori discovers he is also a rent boy with a complex and dangerous life, in which he soon becomes embroiled. In London, Mori puts out feelers among the Japanese community in his search for leads. (Yosuke Kubozuka lends Yuto a needy, nervous energy that justifies what might otherwise seem unconscionably extreme service from his brother.) Mori is played by Takehiro Hira, who gives the detective a bone-deep weariness that makes increasing sense as we see, via a series of flashbacks involving Yuto, that it is not just the burden of ageing parents and a rebellious teenage daughter weighing him down. The latter – which will air the series globally next year – provided the deep coffers needed to split the setting between Tokyo and London. So begins Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame), an intercontinental thriller and co-production between the BBC and Netflix. The theory goes that Yuto is more likely to reveal himself to his brother than anyone else. Mori’s boss – a man possibly ensnared in the Yakuza web himself – requires his underling to go to London and pretend to be a student on a detective refresher course while he does some unofficial digging. Yuto was believed dead, but nobody ever saw the body and there has been a rumoured sighting of him. When a Yakuza boss is killed on Mori’s beat, threatening to destroy the fragile truce that has been maintained for the last few years, it appears that the killing may have been undertaken in revenge for a murder in London that Mori’s younger brother, Yuto, carried out. Y ounger siblings, eh? They are either the attention-sucking baby of the family, leaving you out in the cold, or a thorn in your side causing trouble from cradle to grave.

The hahi hahi