London's Olympic bid cultural supremo Jude Kelly says staging an opening ceremony to match up to the success of Beijing four years ago is bound to be nerve-wrecking.

"Look, it is the biggest cultural platform in the world. Two-thirds of the world's population tune into the opening ceremony.

"Wouldn't you be scared?" she asks.

Kelly, who was speaking over breakfast in the UK capital, says it is natural for many in Britain to fear some form of flop.

"That is what fear does, isn't it? It makes you think it is going to be rubbish," she says.

Kelly, one of the leading figures in UK arts, is confident London will do better than the much-criticized part in the closing ceremony it had at the Beijing Games, which she personally witnessed at the Bird's Nest stadium.

Jude Kelly is confident London will put on an excellent display for this year's Olympics. Nick J. B. Moore / For China Daily

For many it just rolled out old clichs about Britain, featuring London red buses and footballer David Beckham.

"I thought it didn't succeed. It was trying to do too many things all in one go, which made it look clichd, a bit hammy," she says.

Kelly was in charge of the cultural and educational aspects of the London bid for the Games, a key plank of which was a promise the opening ceremony would demonstrate Britain's pre-eminence in theatrical production.

Some details of the planned London opening ceremony, for which she no longer has direct responsibility, are now emerging.

Directed by Danny Boyle, who was behind the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, it will have a cast and crew of 12,000 and an underlying theme of "British humor".

It will also contain some form of tribute to the British National Health Service and feature music by the UK band Underworld.

Stephen Daldry, the internationally renowned theater and film director who had the film hit Billy Elliot, will also oversee the artistic vision for all of the London ceremonies.

"I am not going to second guess what Danny and Stephen are going to do. I think what you can be sure of is that you have a group of artists who are very intelligent, hugely theatrical," she says.

Kelly, 57, is much in demand and will end the day of our interview with a flight to India, where she is involved in other projects. She also travels to China two or three times a year.

"I don't think I am a China expert. I believe in what the arts can do in places like China. It is a place where you can discover different ideas, you can have a sense of adventure and take risks. China at the moment seems to have an appetite for this. It wants its people to be curious," she says.

In her role as artistic director of the Southbank Centre, one of the UK's leading performance venues, she had just received a visit from officials from the Guangzhou Opera House, the new 1,800-seater venue designed by British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

"They really want to know how to create something like the Southbank Centre in Guangzhou. They wanted to know what made 22 million people walk by and 8 million actually come here last year," she says.

Kelly, who is from Liverpool, says it was the arts and wanting to be a director that finally arrested her from a somewhat wayward adolescence.

"I often say if I hadn't found a way of being creative professionally, I could possibly have gone off the rails as a lot of young people can do," she says.

Yet even studying drama at Birmingham University, one of her lecturers wanted to knock back her ambitions to direct.

"He told me that there had only been three recent women theater directors. He said one was a lesbian, one had committed suicide and the other was retired and asked me which I wanted to be," she says.

Despite the lack of encouragement, she had success at the Battersea Arts Centre in London and then at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, making it one of the UK's premier national theaters.

Kelly is keen to give Western ticket holders an insight into contemporary China.

"We do Peking Operas as a cultural-interest thing. There is a big appetite, however, from audiences who want to know a lot more than that about China," she says.

You can contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.