Summary
From undercover field operatives to online anonymity, via lives led in the closet and large scale infidelity, Matthew Sweet discusses the what can prompt people to lead double lives. With: Ashleigh Percival-Borleigh, Radio 4 New Generation Thinker, former soldier and historian, researching the lives of under-cover agents during WW2 Lawrence Scott, literary critic and commentator on social media and the double lives people lead online Peter Parker, historian of gay life in Britain before homosexuality was decriminalized, has documented decades of lives lived in the closet Clare Carlisle, philosopher and biographer of Soren Kierkegaard, who thought there’s always a difference between our inner selves and the face we present to the world Plus the actress Ruth Wilson, whose 2018 drama Mrs Wilson unraveled the story of her own grandfather's multiple lives
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:05.7 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, The Traitors Uncloaked. |
| 0:12.7 | But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's Saturday bonus episodes, |
| 0:18.2 | The Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Rylan, and comedy specials |
| 0:22.2 | from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffel and Rommashranganathan. However, and maybe I'm biased, |
| 0:27.9 | it's really all about the traitors uncoaked. So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and |
| 0:32.6 | podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. Hello, welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:39.8 | Are you Ernest in the town and Jack in the country? |
| 0:43.3 | Clark Kent on the streets and Superman above them? |
| 0:46.5 | Are you perhaps a Welsh politician jailed for being a paid agent of the Russians? |
| 0:51.4 | Well, few of us can say yes to these things, but we know the territory. |
| 0:55.7 | We understand the idea of the double life and what it means to be, well, totally bifurcated. |
| 1:02.1 | The double life is the subject of this programme, the stranger than fiction kind and the everyday kind. |
| 1:08.0 | Those different cells we reveal to different people. And our guest tonight |
| 1:12.5 | contain multitudes. And what I'm really hoping for is that in the next hour, we're going to build |
| 1:18.0 | a bit of a then diagram from their experiences and expertise that will find where the life of a |
| 1:24.4 | modern soldier, a wartime spy, or a 1950s clerk who hopes to pick up a boxer in a pub on the Edgeware Road, might overlap with, say, what an actor feels while being Cordelia, or what Sauran Kierkegaard felt when he broke off his engagement, or what happens when you look at your Spotify summary of the year and think, |
| 1:45.4 | Who is this person who listens to so much Sabrina Carpenter? |
| 1:49.1 | Well, let me gather the crowd. |
| 1:51.6 | Bitten by a radioactive spider when he was a boy, |
| 1:54.4 | Peter Parker is a press photographer by day, |
| 1:57.2 | and Spider-Man, when duty calls, but he's just a drawing. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.