Borrowing marathon parlance, Ruth Mackenzie, in charge of the Cultural Olympiad and its showpiece London 2012 summer festival, says her efforts have reached a critical moment. "This is the point where we hit the wall," she says. "This is our maddest time." The analogy is a good one but also a risky one, because for some runners "the wall" spells disaster.
With just 100 days to go before the festival opens on 21 June Mackenzie fizzes with confidence and enthusiasm for the cultural events commissioned to mark the Olympics. "Our fundamental criteria has been that they will only happen once in a lifetime," she says.
Mackenzie is speaking before the festival's brochure deadline, the point of no return. "You go into overdrive trying to cram in the last 56 brilliant ideas that you have in time for the deadline and it is always the time when any problem that's ever going to happen to the project emerges – one second before you're putting it in the brochure," Mackenzie says.
The "brochure" will not be made public until the end of April when a document bigger than the Edinburgh Fringe guide will be published and we will see for ourselves just how unforgettable – or forgettable – the festival will be.
In terms of what we know, many would say that the signs are good: a Pina Bausch retrospective at Sadlers' Wells and the Barbican; films by Mike Leigh and Lynne Ramsay; Cate Blanchett on stage in Botho Strauss's Big and Small; Martin Creed trying to get the entire nation to ring a bell quickly and loudly for three minutes; spectacular pyrotechnics on Windermere; Radio 1's Hackney Weekend with Leona Lewis, Plan B and more; Simon Rattle conducting Wynton Marsalis' swing symphony; one-off screenings of newly restored Hitchcock films across London; and exhibitions of work by Damien Hirst at Tate Modern and Tracey Emin at Margate.
Barely a day goes by without Mackenzie attending a launch for what is invariably "a major announcement." On Tuesday, the Birmingham Opera Company will reveal details of its plan to stage the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's six-hour opera Mittwoch, which includes a section in which a string quartet performs in four separate helicopters. The transformation of the Olympiad's reputation has been remarkable. Mackenzie was appointed just two years ago, a short period in terms of arts commissioning. "You have to take the positive," she says. "There's not much point in moaning that it would have been nicer to have been there three years earlier. It means I had to move fast and be decisive and that is quite exhilarating. There's not much room for hesitation. It's been fun. On a good day it is really good fun."
The brief history of the Cultural Olympiad is this. It was launched in the autumn of 2008 to a largely negative response – it seemed so earnest, so mired in committee-led worthiness. Most arts bosses would say "yes we will be taking part … once we know who's in charge and what it is we're taking part in." It lacked a big idea until, very late in the day, with Mackenzie's appointment.
White the "Cultural Olympiad" brand was becoming a bit of a joke, Mackenzie thinks some of the criticisms were unfair. They were responsible for a lot of successes, she says. "Our latest figures show that 16m people have experienced the Cultural Olympiad over four years – that's great."
She adds: "A lot of it was not easy or simple for journalists to talk about. But with the greatest respect that doesn't mean it's not good."
Mackenzie says some of the Cultural Olympiad achievements had been "phenomenal". Things such as the Tate Movie project which involved 34,000 children making a film with Aardman; the Lakes Alive festival in Cumbria which some assume must have been going on for decades; and the enormously successful Big Dance.
The World Shakespeare Festival was also up and running before Mackenzie got involved. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Festival, thousands of artists from around the world will take part in nearly 70 productions. There will also be a connected season produced by Shakespeare's Globe that will have every play performed in a different language – Antony and Cleopatra in Turkish, for example, Cymbeline in Juba Arabic, and Henry VI, Part 2 in Albanian.
Another important part of the Cultural Olympiad is the £3m Unlimited strand, billed as the biggest ever UK celebration of disabled arts. But people still simply did not "get" the Cultural Olympiad. Mackenzie realised that an easy to grasp arts celebration was also needed, hence the London 2012 Festival.
There are now so many projects, so many people involved, that it is hard to get a precise handle on the figures. Roughly speaking, however, the overall budget is more than £97m. That breaks down to £52m for commissions for the London 2012 Festival and £45m for projects in the broader Cultural Olympiad. It is clearly a large sum although not that much more than the £80m allocated to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games.
Countdown event
The fact Glasgow is doing anything at all for the London Olympics – an event that, as Bremner put it, is "145 days and 400 miles away", – is something of a coup. But here is the SNP culture minister, Fiona Hyslop, in animated conversation with Mackenzie.
While in Glasgow, Mackenzie works the room faultlessly, like a politician. That should come as no surprise. She did work as a special adviser in the department of culture under five different secretaries of state, a feat of endurance by any measure. She knows how things work and she understands the politics of politics. She also needs such skills to deal with the fair amount of snide comment still directed at the Cultural Olympiad. The former Culture Show presenter Lauren Laverne read a skit about it on a recent edition of Channel 4's 10 O'Clock show, mocking a project in Coventry where a 10m-high Lady Godiva puppet is being built which will travel to London powered by 100 cyclists. An easy target perhaps.
"My view is that mocking modern art is 20 years out of date," said Mackenzie. "When I started in the arts I remember people mocked the Tate for having bricks outside it and a man walking round East Anglia with a pole on his head. Now Tate Modern is one of the most popular destinations in London."
Most of the arts community appears to be on board. At the recent State of the Arts conference in Salford, a gathering of arts managers from across England, the playwright David Edgar questioned the funds being spent on the opening ceremony but not, to be fair, on the London 2012 Festival.
"Afterwards I thought of a really good response but I was at Crewe," she says. "Just as we in the arts world say it is a false proposition when you say 'Why don't you stop funding the arts and spend the money on hospitals?' it is exactly the same to think you have to have a choice between having the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and the Arts Council's cuts to regularly funded clients.
"No one attacked me at that conference, no one has attacked me in the arts world."
She has, she says, been cut quite a lot of slack. "Once people thought it was going to be a good thing then everyone wanted to help. Success has many parents." Of course there is cynicism, there always is, but you have to seek it out, she adds.
Boat building
Around 450 miles away from Glasgow, in an ordinary looking boat shed in an isolated marina near the West Sussex military base of Thorney Island, is The Boat Project. Artist Gary Winters ponders whether he has had any negative reaction. After a few seconds he says: "We haven't had any. I can't really remember any time when people have shook their heads or thrown their hands up and said, 'What are you doing,' or 'You're wasting money.'"
The project has a simple premise – they asked for pieces of wood that mean something to people with which they would then build a boat. It has, he says, resonated with people. The soon-to-be-finished result is an impressively sleek work of art, a kind of wooden collage.
Master boat builder Mark Covell has led a team converting and flattening everything from a guitar to a cricket bat to mundane planks. "You're having to think in completely different ways all of the time," he says. "The thing for me is that we haven't built a contorted boat – if were to paint it white it would look absolutely like a modern boat.
"It has been a project full of things I've never ever had to do before. It's like putting a man on the moon – we are in completely uncharted territory."
They finished collecting 1,220 donations in July and laid everything – including wood from HMS Victory, from Sir Alec Rose's boat Lively Lady, from the Olympic velodrome, a tiny two-inch square piece of wood from the Mary Rose, a light box from the Ark Royal – in the car park before embarking on the jigsaw of all jigsaws.
Every donation is chronicled, everything, whether it is "wood that looks like a fish" or "driftwood found by husband sitting on doorstep" or, movingly, a mother donating the A-level woodwork project from her late son. "There are some poignant stories," said Covell. "We're not sawing through these pieces with a wave of a hand, we're doing it with real respect.
"We almost don't see it as pieces of wood any more, we see it for what it is – a collection of stories."
The project is one of 12 visual arts projects across the UK called Artists Taking the Lead. Others include Anthony McCall creating a corkscrew of mist on Merseyside that will be visible 60 miles away; a full-sized football pitch created and hidden in a Scottish forest; LED art screens on bus shelter roofs in London and art work created from the wreckage of a DC-9 aeroplane that will tour Wales.
Winters (along with Gregg Whelan) is artistic director of the performance company Lone Twin. They put their application in for the south-east commission in 2009 with a synopsis that basically said "people contribute wood, a boat is made, boat sails". They were shortlisted and they found Covell to discover if it was actually possible, put in the fuller submission to Arts Council England and discovered they had won. "Then we had to do it," Winters said, laughing. "It was amazing. As a company, we've been fully immersed in the project for the past two years. It is a £500,000 commission which is a decent sized chunk of money that has afforded us a certain scale of operation. It's fantastic, it's going to come off."
The boat will be launched on 7 May, sailing to Portsmouth, Brighton, Hastings, Margate, before being put on a trailer for Milton Keynes. It will also be in Weymouth for the Olympic sailing events.
"A lot of these objects would have ended up in a skip, the objects, stories and memories all lost."
Winters said Lone Twin is happy and proud to be part of the Cultural Olympiad. "We use the phrase 'Cultural Olympiad' all the time and tell people we're part of it but it seems still a slightly alien term to people – I'm sure that will change. I don't think we'll be able to know how good it was, whether it worked until it's over."
If there are naysayers then Waters says simply: "Come and see the work. The country needs culture doesn't it. It is great to be part of a national event, we're proud."