Nine fascinating facts we learned from The Civilisations Podcast

Alyse Emdur's book contains over 100 images of prisoners posing in front of landscape paintings.

Her interest was sparked after she found a Polaroid of her family in front of a painted beach scene in the visiting room of the prison where her brother was an inmate.

In episode three she tells Viv: "I was startled by something about it. This painting behind us represented freedom, the exact opposite of what my brother was living."

During the course of her research, Alyse discovered that the backdrops are often painted by talented prisoners before being utilised as a backdrop for portraiture sessions.

Ultimately she spent six years collecting photographs from prisoners, as well as taking her own images, before curating them in her book, Prison Landscapes.

In episode two Viv caught up with Mary Beard. The classicist admits she wasn't overly enthusiastic about the prospect of becoming a TV presenter.

She reveals: "I didn't do any telly until I was 50. I didn't particularly want to do it, really. I was sort of chatted up by Janice Hadlow, who was then the controller of BBC Two.

"I was very reluctant because I know telly takes forever. You have to sit around the whole time, it's not just going and speaking a few words to camera and disappearing. It's hours and hours, really boring stuff!

"She said, 'I know you've said publicly that if you look at history documentaries that it's wrinkled old men, you don't ever get middle-aged female historians doing telly. Now, my dear, I'm giving you the chance to do it, you're jolly well going to do it otherwise that's really bad faith, and stop complaining'."

During the 2013 coup in Egypt, archaeologist Monica Hanna and her friend Safa drove for hours through fighting between rebels and the security forces. Their goal was the Mallawi City Museum in central Egypt, which had been attacked by looters.

In episode one, Hanna tells Viv her story: "No one was really giving attention to the museums... This is my museum, this is our museum, this should not happen to it. We should just not leave it up to the government to react because apparently they're afraid or reluctant to do anything about it... I took the situation in hand."

When they reached the museum, which sits on the banks of the Nile a few hours south of Cairo, they found that many artefacts had been stolen and destroyed.

Monica and Hanna found themselves face-to-face with protesters seeking to vent their frustration. They told her: "The government is killing our people and this is our chance to take revenge from the government."

Before he was the naturalist national treasure we know and love today, David Attenborough was a senior BBC executive. And in the late 1960s he had a problem – people weren't that enthusiastic about the new technology, colour TV.

In episode two of the podcast, we hear from the man himself about how the 1969 series Civilisation came into being partly because of this issue.

He says: "I thought a very simple idea would be to get all the loveliest pictures in colour, put them in chronological order and there you would have a series.

"There was one person you would have to consult in those days, Kenneth Clark. We invited him to lunch and started talking about it. It was him that changed the simple functional idea into something of a masterpiece, along with Peter Montagnon and Michael Gill.

"They weren't just about pictures; they're about philosophy, science, Rousseau, Goethe, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven. I ran it for 13 episodes because we had to convince people who hadn't yet bought their colour television sets."

In episode one Viv went to the British Museum – and was thrilled to be escorted through a secret door disguised as a bookcase. On the other side she met Jill Cook, a specialist in the archaeology of human evolution.

Jill emphatically believes that the creativity of the earliest humans should be called art: "I called my book Ice Age Art so I'm a firm believer!"

She tells Viv: "I think this idea that the art of deep, deep history should not be called art comes from ideas of the mid-20th Century which tried to say, 'well these are people who had a different lifestyle from us, they lived by hunting and gathering, their economy is different. We don’t know exactly what they believed in, so we shouldn’t call this art'."

Therefore in an age where surviving was a probably a full-time occupation, there must have been a significance to objects beyond their aesthetic appeal – they must have had a spiritual or religious purpose.

That doesn't mean they're not art in Jill's eyes: "What’s the Sistine Chapel, is that art or is that religious? You can’t separate one from the other!"

Before he fell in love with photography, Ansel Adams aspired to be a concert pianist. While he would instead find acclaim as a photographer, he didn't give up on playing the piano.

In episode three Kenneth Brower, an environmental writer who knew Adams, describes how Adams still loved to play for people.

Brower says: "He would play around on the piano, he would play certain notes with an orange. He would do this in the middle of a serious piece, it would go nutty. If he wanted a big majestic chord, he'd turn around and play it with his behind.

"He was just full of fun in that way. At the end of the day, when he'd finished in his dark room, he liked to unwind. All the sort of bohemians, the pre-hippies, would come by."

In episode four Viv meets up with writer and critic Brian Dillon to explore our collective fascination with ruins.

He tells her about one wacky plan for London landmark Battersea Power Station, which he says has been "languishing since the early 1980s as a kind of modern industrial ruin".

He adds: "I first visited about 10 years ago and the developers who were working on the site told me they had a plan to install, at the top of one of the chimneys, a single table restaurant.

"So one would ascend through the chimney and maybe two, three or four people could have dinner looking out over the city, at the pinnacle of this post-industrial ruin. That seems to me a really fantastic emblem of how cities succeed and sometimes really fail to remake their ruins."

Brian Dillon also tells Viv that the Nazis had a surprising attitude toward ruins. He says: "Hitler's architect Albert Speer had an idea of what he called ruin value. This had come into his mind because he had seen buildings bombed and thought of them in terms of classical ruins. They immediately reminded him of the ruins of Greece and Rome.

"Speer comes up with an idea in his projected rebuilding of Germany, and especially of Berlin, that these buildings should be built so that they would make attractive ruins in thousands of years to come."

While other Nazi leaders were worried about suggesting to Hitler that the Nazi era would end, the Führer was taken by the idea that their architecture would sit in the landscape exuding faded grandeur for all time.

Speer wrote about the war after he was released from 20 years in prison: "Hitler liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity."

Dillon adds: "It's part of the Nazi's conservative aesthetics, part of their return to the classical as a very simple, and in many respects a simple-minded vision, of what the architecture of the future should be."

In Civilisations: The Triumph of Art, Simon Schama sums up the wild life of one the world's greatest ever painters: "Hair-trigger violent, short-fuse foul-mouthed, unwashed hoodlum; constantly in trouble with the cops, in and out of jail. But if he acted like a devil, he painted like an angel..."

In 1609 he was disfigured in an attack known as ‘sfregio’ – an Italian word which can mean either a gash or an insult. The purpose of this was to leave the victim permanently scarred and visibly dishonoured.

Caravaggio himself was no stranger to this act – seven years before he had attacked a courtesan in the same way because she had refused to sleep with him.

In Caravaggio's case, so numerous were his enemies it was hard to know who was behind his assault. In episode five Viv seeks out experts and delves into the BBC archive to reveal the truth about the wild life of the artistic genius.