Aidan Turner in the BBC's Radio Times Audience Award winning PoldarkBBC

It really is time that I stopped writing about the BBC. Yes, my previous columns on the unrivalled BBC Shakespeare Festival or their current poster-woman, Sophie Okonedo, may have entertained, educated and informed. But were they really ‘high-quality’, ‘distinctive’, or – most crucially of all in this twisted media-world consisting almost exclusively of brand-sponsored Instagram feeds and House of Cards-style political bumping-offs – ‘impartial’?

I borrow the terms used by Culture Secretary John Whittingdale in his recent White Paper, ‘A BBC for the future: a broadcaster of distinction’. A more fitting title may well have been ‘Defining the BBC of the future: broader and more indistinctly’, given that one of the biggest shake-ups in this supposedly revolutionary paper of reform is the arbitrary change that has been made to the BBC’s mission statement. Baron Reith, first Director-General of the BBC and original proponent of the need for an independent public broadcaster, summarised the purpose of the BBC in three words: to “inform, educate, entertain”. To this, Whittingdale has tacked on the lexical equivalent of jazz hands; it’s some meaningless sparkle which reveals little – other than the government’s desire to keep the corporation firmly under its thumb, however gratuitous its input may be. The White Paper demands the BBC “act in the public interest, serving all audiences with impartial, high-quality and distinctive media content and services that inform, educate and entertain”.

Fair enough; were I to hold Whittingdale’s reformulation to the same standards that he holds the BBC to, he would get 10 out of 10 for entertainment. I stand by this, because to argue that the BBC is somehow less high-quality or less distinctive than its live broadcast competitors is laughable. The Beeb’s sweep at the BAFTA TV Awards, held only four days before the publication of the White Paper, is surely evidence of that.

Not only did BBC shows win a string of critical awards (for shows including Wolf Hall, Great British Bake Off, Strictly Come Dancing, and – for the ninth time in the Soap and Continuing Drama category – Eastenders), but Poldark also bagged the Radio Times Audience Award. Surely this must be some indication that the BBC needs little advice from a notably unpopular government on how to appeal to the majority audience.

Yet Whittingdale falls short on the “educational” and “informative” fronts. His stress on “impartiality” doesn’t seem particularly well-considered next to the White Paper’s other major change. The new Charter will see the abolition of the BBC Trust, to be replaced by a unitary board made up of not only BBC executives, but also government officials.

What Whittingdale might really be getting at when he describes the future BBC “impartial”, is a broadcaster which has been safely removed from the “leftwing luvvies” (his words), only to be placed back into the mitts of those whose only experience with entertainment comes from their comically school-boy performances in the House of Commons.

Whittingdale’s aforementioned “luvvie” remark presumably refers to the industry’s best and brightest, who indeed made something of a song and dance about their beloved broadcaster while picking up awards (for the BBC, one should point out) at the BAFTA awards for television. According to reports by The Guardian, Iain Hislop was one of a number of stars to come out in defence of the BBC that evening: “The BBC have allowed Have I News For You to be rude about governments...and rude about the BBC, which is a privilege you are given with public service broadcasting and not on state television”. This unusually political acceptance speech was not the first of the night, following that of Peter Kosminsky, director of double award-winning Wolf Hall.

Whilst Kosminksy’s comparison of Whittingdale’s BBC to the propaganda stations of Russia and North Korea resembled the far-fetched embellishment of a good story-teller, he is right to be wary of government involvement. Elected officials should be responsible in demanding that the BBC meet objective targets that genuinely ensure it is best serving the people of the UK. The White Paper’s requirement that the BBC “give greater focus to under-served audiences, in particular those from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds, and those in the nations and regions” is an excellent example of one such stipulation.

What we don’t need is officials throwing around loaded terms that serve no purpose but to tarnish and intimidate a proudly independent organisation, for fear that the BBC joins the NHS on the list of public services this government seeks to underfund and then undermine. If what we want is for the BBC to stop wasting the taxpayer’s money on unproductive middle-men, perhaps we should stop paying John Whittingdale to sit at his desk with a thesaurus, coming up with gratuitous synonyms to describe what the majority of Britain already knows it has: a high-functioning, high-achieving, and highly-envied national broadcasting service.