Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting.

Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, and I make podcasts for the BBC.

I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book.

But when I started commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts.

I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right mixture of sounds could take you into

a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to

give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole

new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories

that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds Music, radio podcasts. This is a thinking aloud podcast from the BBC and for more

details and much, much more about thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co.com.

Hello, I rather enjoyed an email I received a few weeks ago from someone who rather, well, rather melancholicly described himself as an intermittent listener to Thinking Aloud.

But he added, I am fascinated by the extraordinary range of topics that are

covered in your programme. Is there no limit? No limit at all to the phenomena that are studied by

social scientists? Well, intermittent listener, if today happens to be one of your attendance days,

here's another string to your bow.

A discussion solely devoted to a book entitled The Virtues of Underwear, Modesty, Flamboyance, and Filth.

And its author, who now joins me, is freelance writer Nina Edwards.

Nina, where do we find the first material evidence of something which would count as underwear?

It's very difficult because underwear tends to be worn a great deal and wears out and then no longer exists.

And one doesn't often see ancient underwear in our museums.

But the Egyptian pharaoh's tombs,

...