Python list formatting

Question

I have a list, which looks like this:

params
['h\x00i\x00', '\x00t\x00h\x00e\x00r\x00e\x00']

Now, all I want is to merge these two elements into the string "hi there", but when I use

print ' '.join(params)

I get

h i  t h e r e

How do I strip out those hex characters to make the string "hi there"?