Michael Sheen among big names in call for action as leading figure warns there will be little left of the sector in 10 years

Not every Welsh valley can reverberate with choral singing and declaimed poetry, despite the stereotype. But leading figures in Welsh culture are warning that a different environment is looming: “An alien who landed in the country today would look around and think, “Wow, there do seem to be an awful lot of problems here for all the arts,” said Graeme Farrow.

Farrow, the artistic chief at the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), fears that rather than a landscape of fertile creativity, any visiting alien would be confronted with the near collapse of a string of national institutions, including the National Theatre Wales, Welsh National Opera and S4C, the Welsh television channel, which a year ago lost first one boss, Siân Doyle, to a row over accusations of bullying and then another, Llinos Griffin-Williams, amid claims of abusive behaviour at a rugby match.