Due to its legendary nose for news, last week’s Sunday Times was first to reveal the “eight experts” chosen by culture secretary John Whittingdale to “help decide the BBC’s future”, the Murdoch empire barely able to wait to share its horror at the venerable institution’s latest humiliation.

And what a golden shower of talent Whittingdale has stitched together, a veritable human centipede of business-minded entities, in order to safeguard the nation’s cultural heritage.

Dawn Airey is the former head of Channel 5, the launch of which in 1997 marked a colourful new chapter in British broadcasting. Some might say that asking a former head of Channel 5 to decide the future of the BBC is a bit like asking someone who draws ejaculating penises on the inside of public toilet cubicle doors to curate the National Gallery, but she is sure to bring an interesting perspective to the negotiating table.

My eight-year-old said that if David Cameron dismantled the BBC, he would send him a collage of photographs of dog muck

Dame Colette Bowe sits alongside her, chief press officer to the late Leon Brittan in the 1970s, and currently chairwoman of the Banking Standards Board. She must be brilliant, as bringing standards to banking is a tough job. Apparently there’s a Conservative MPs’ Scruples Committee as well.

Darren Henley is a former managing director of Classic FM, which is like Radio 3 with all the problematic programmes filleted out, the perfect playlist to keep people calm while they wait on hold for hours for someone in a call centre to answer their phone. “Just one Cornetto! Give it to me! Delicious ice cream. From Italy.”

Andrew Fisher is the executive chairman of Shazam, a smartphone app which identifies unknown songs, and with which he has made the world a much duller place, bereft of mystery; crushing the richness of human experience for economic gain, giving you what you want, right here, right now. Perhaps Andrew can now develop an app that can identify what someone has had for dinner from the smell of their farts?

His co-committee member, Alex Mahon, is a former chief executive of Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group, connecting her to the exciting world of government-friendly media businessfolk, Cotswold kitchen-supper snafflers, and police horse-sharers, and to those most likely to monetise the vacant space left in broadcasting should she and her colleagues have, regrettably, to reform the BBC out of existence.

In an atmosphere reminiscent of a medieval witch trial, where the three-nippled woman with all the cats is bound to be found guilty of whatever she can be tortured into confessing to, everyone knows the BBC has been doing something wrong, and must be punished, just as soon as some appropriate crimes can be agreed upon.

But no one so far seems to know what kind of BBC they want. Our metrosexual prime minister believes it should concentrate on the kind of HBO box set programming he and Sam enjoy when chillaxing at home, and which he imagines emerges fully formed from a salami-making machine in Los Angeles.

Others complain the BBC makes shows that are “too commercial”, and clearly it would be better if the job of making popular shows, and indeed all television, was left up to Sky, since they are so good at it. But who could ever have dreamed that a show about an old man travelling through time in a phone box, a laugh track-free sitcom set in a paper company office, complete with cutaways to photocopier in-trays, and a motoring review show in which vehicle analysis is interspersed with actionably inappropriate banter, would become commercial hits?

True creativity isn’t an exact science. But is there anyone on the culture secretary’s panel of business-friendly bean-counters who understands this? Indeed, the actual creative talents who have made the BBC the globally respected brand it is of late are notably absent from the negotiations.

Where is Armando Iannucci, a BBC-nurtured polymath now making box-set content for HBO? Where are Russell T Davies, Mark Gatiss, and Steven Moffatt, who between them made massively successful brands of genres viewers maintained that they loathed – nerdy science fiction, sexless literary detective stories and hardcore gay action? Where are Dick and Dom or Horrible Histories, educating children by stealth, and David Attenborough, who did the same to generations of adults? And where am I?

The battle for the BBC | Charlotte Higgins Read more

Like it or not, and I am not sure that I do, I am objectively the most critically acclaimed British TV comedian this century, and every one of my BBC series of the last decade has been either nominated for, or won, multiple Bafta, British Comedy and Chortle awards. Any panel on the future of the BBC that includes a phone app bloke over me is clearly not worth the beer mat it was hastily drawn up on.

The sad truth is, the reason none of the above artists, writers and communicators are welcome on the culture secretary’s committee is because they see culture as inherently valuable in and of itself, not simply as a branch of business that is too naive to know how to maximise its profit margins. And there is no place for them in his process.

Last Sunday, after I read in the Sunday Times of the culture secretary’s plans, I was stuck in traffic on the north circular with the kids. A new young writer called John Osborne, who I hadn’t heard of before, came on Radio 4 and told a half-hour story about childhood holidays that left all of us, aged four, eight and 47, spellbound. The kids noticed I was crying and asked why.

I explained it was not just the quality of the work, but also that the government were dismantling the only broadcaster that would ever commission it. My eight-year-old said that if David Cameron did that he would send him a collage of hundreds of photographs of dog muck. You cross creatives at your peril.

I’ve been watching a lot of spaghetti westerns of late. I developed a taste for them in the late 80s when Alex Cox used to rave about them on BBC2’s Moviedrome, informing me, educating me, and entertaining me, as he did. Their big, simple gestures tell me everything I need to know. Robert Hossein’s revenge tale Cemetery Without Crosses, from 1969, has just been cleaned up by for commercial release by Arrow films.

Maria (Michèle Mercier) arranges for the daughter of her husband’s killer to be raped. But in a haunting, dialogue-free scene, her uncertain expression appears to convey a hint of regret that she let her desire for vengeance get the better of her conscience.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is playing at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh in August, and London from 21 September