The director of London’s Southbank Centre tells Joanna Moorhead about the notions of tolerance and exploration that have inspired her latest festival project

They call her “Lucozade on legs” and it’s not difficult to figure out why. Jude Kelly is busy, busy, busy; it takes weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with her PR to arrange a meeting. Eventually a date is set and when I arrive I am ushered into Canteen, the restaurant below the Royal Festival Hall in London, the beating heart of Kelly’s empire. She is already there, in another meeting, and I am shown to a separate table so she can move on to me, à la speed dating.

Kelly has been artistic director of the Southbank Centre for more than a decade and, in her uniform of jeans and trainers, with her trademark black-fringed blonde hair, she’s also extremely visible. Her Big Thing has been an energetic and inventive programme of festivals: this year’s include the now-annual Women of the World Festival, the Nordic Matters Festival, the Imagine Children’s Festival and the Festival of Love (“an annual celebration of the force that makes the world go round”, says the website). But eclipsing all of these for 2017, at least in the sense that it is 12 months long, is a festival called Belief and Beyond Belief, which explores through a programme of music, art, talks and discussions, humanity’s faith and doubt in something greater than ourselves.