Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon.

There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of Hugh Hudson's epic account of the British athletes at the 1924 Olympiad in Paris famously prompted scriptwriter Colin Welland to yell from the Academy Award podium, "The British are coming!" As the British film industry went on to collapse in on itself throughout the 1980s, it turns out he was largely wrong about that. But 30 years on, Chariots is having its moment again.

A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship, a young generation of directors were producing some of the best films in the world. It was never going to be easy to choose just 20 to reflect that, but our task as curators would have been a lot easier if one country, Argentina, wasn’t producing quite so many wonderful films.

Matilda, the Royal Shakespeare Company-spawned musical about an extraordinary young girl, managed the extraordinary feat Sunday of snaring a record seven trophies at last night’s 36^th Laurence Olivier Awards. Its rampaging hold over the black-tie ceremony at the Royal Opera House came at the expense of such comic hopefuls as One Man, Two Guvnors and The Ladykillers, which had 10 nominations between them and emerged with no awards. Nor did the twice-nominated Noises Off.

Two things are certain with music coming from the north: there will be some wonderful surprises and some of it will sound like nothing else on earth. It’s even more enticing when the two merge. Making the peculiar accessible is a uniquely Scandinavian knack. There are more than a few examples of that – the creation of new micro-genres – in this round-up of current and new releases, but some straightforward albums are equally striking. First, however, we head for the offbeat end of the spectrum.

The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies has fallen on the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An edited group of 36 players has recorded the anthems at the Abbey Road Studios in 60 gruelling recording hours over six days. But which would try their patience most?

On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.

The annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians may not sound like an event liable to stop traffic, but this year's gathering at LSO St Luke's (13 and 14 April) offered such treats as a conversation with Sir Colin Davis, a concert celebrating 100 years of jazz composer/arranger Gil Evans by the Guildhall Jazz Band, and a masterclass from soprano Amanda Roocroft.

Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.

Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard if being British still means what it did 100 years. Then, two momentous calamities singed themselves into the national psyche: the Titanic sank, and Captain Scott and his four companions failed to return from the South Pole.