Following its relaunch in March, the BFI (formerly the NFT, formerly still a grey old restaurant that you’d scoot past on the way to aThames view) has taken on a completely new character.

For some composers, a centenary is too soon to find a rounded perspective on their work. The music may still be widely influential, or it may have gone temporarily out of fashion. It's different with Olivier Messiaen, even though his music has never stopped being with us since he died in 1992, because he wrote half a dozen huge works at various stages of his life that have always had the effect of summing up what he was about. So there is a confidence about the South Bank Centre's year-long festival, which properly began with a blockbuster, Des canyons aux étoiles, written when the composer was in his sixties.

For 30 years Melvyn Bragg has prided himself on the egalitarianism of 'The South Bank Show'. In ITV's current chilly commercial climate he's had to pare back his team – but he'll never stop being a guardian of the arts. He tells Ciar Byrne why

When you're outside it, the joke is no laughing matter: Humour is lost in translation at this show: for gags, stick to 'The Simpsons'

"We all live together, you see, and tonight this is for Jack," says Nick Mulvey, pointing at the saxophonist, who sports the looks of Jude Law and a chunky Norwegian jersey. "He sleepwalks and fell down the stairs last night." It's a genial way for the hang-player to introduce "Steps in the Wrong Direction", a track from this new band's first CD, Knee-Deep in the North Sea.

Halfway through Europe's most glorious century, the 19th, Eugne Guinot opined "in Europe there are two capitals: Paris for the winter and Baden-Baden for the summer". This month I have visited both. However lovely the German spa town may be, it does not have the qualities of scale, diversity, wealth and culture that defines a great capital (and no, it wasn't just that I was there in the wrong season). The French capital has a stronger claim, yet it has been comprehensively out-pointed in our survey of civic greatness. London is the world's capital, and ex officio capital of Europe, the northern hemisphere and, let's speculate, the solar system.

If there is a sudden vacancy, Johnson is surely the favourite

Children's Literary Festivals Tue to Fri South Bank Centre & Barbican Pit, London

CONTRARY TO myth, the output of J S Bach was never wholly forgotten after his death in 1750. Some of the keyboard music continued to circulate in manuscript; the motets, to be sung in Leipzig, where Mozart heard one. And a belated biography in 1802 sparked new interest. But it was the first performance in a century of the St Matthew Passion, put on in Berlin in 1829 by the 20-year-old Mendelssohn, that really kick-started the great 19th-century Bach revival.

When she's not on stage, the pianist Helene Grimaud runs an animal sanctuary. The responsibility enriches her music, she tells Michael Church

Juan Diego Florez is touted as the tenor to watch. After his triumphant Royal Opera run, he tells Michael Church he is shocked - but rather chuffed - at being compared to 'last century's greatest voice'

When everyone was listening to Sinatra, Ol' Blue Eyes himself was listening to the velvet-voiced Tony Bennett, who tells Anthony Quinn how he is keeping the timeless art of crooning alive