OK, now it’s serious. There will be a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ and Tony Hall will make sure of it. They’ve made him a member of the House of Lords today to give him the platform to bully it through. It comes in the week that his nominee as director of it, Ruth Mackenzie, starts work.

And all this after almost five years of faffing around after it was our cultural acuity that was credited with winning (if that’s the word) the 2012 Olympics in the first place.

But it won’t be called the Cultural Olympiad. Mackenzie’s first job is to come up with a name that everyone can reasonably be expected to understand, one word that bears no relation to that other bureaucratic confection which doesn’t mean anything. The next thing is to make it so that it doesn’t get trapped in the IOC’s spider’s web around logos, accreditation and badges.

Then she has to invent a festival, because that is what it will amount to – a ‘festival of festivals’, probably a vast street event that has to do the impossible thing of having a national impact and also giving the impoverished five East End boroughs that surround the Olympic site some kind of, dread word as Beachcomber would say, legacy. This why she has got Brian McMaster (ex-Edinburgh Festival), Alex Poots (Manchester Festival) and Martin Duncan (Chichester Festival Theatre) as paid advisers. The fourth is English National Ballet’s Craig Hassall, who was in c charge of branding for the Sydney Olympics.

Lord H started with no budget when his board was created last July but he’s managed to shake down £80m in cash and kind for Mackenzie to work with, and has told her to come up with one announcement, and one only, in a couple of months, which means April.

‘We’ve got a chance to make culture a part of what the Olympics does’ he told we hacks at lunch last week. ‘We’ve got a chance to change the way this country looks at arts and culture by making a statement that this is as important as sport’. Now he can bang on about it in a forum where everyone will take notice. Won’t they?