There’s a new word in the lexicon of media bullshit: it is “distinctiveness”. A report, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and published last week, argues that “greater distinctiveness” in the BBC’s output will allow its commercial rivals to make an extra £115m a year.

That seems pretty great, doesn’t it? The BBC’s output gets massively more “distinctive”, which sounds like absolutely unanswerably superb news, and at the same time commercial broadcasters make millions of extra pounds. How hugely splendid all round. Hooray.

So what is this “distinctiveness” that we’re all going to be enjoying? What are distinctive things? Well, I’m immediately thinking of the taste of chicken liver, the sound of James Mason’s voice, the design tradition of Citroën cars until the late 80s, the smell of pipe smoke, the style of Raymond Chandler’s prose. Those are all thoroughly attractive attributes and I can’t wait for BBC TV and radio programmes to sort of somehow start having more of that kind of thing about them.

This is like telling a boxer to throw a fight and make it look realistic

And, in other related brilliantness, ITV, Sky, Heart FM et al will have lots more money – which obviously isn’t distinctive at all, a certain uniformity being an unavoidable drawback of any currency, but is still nice to have and they can always choose to use it to buy lovely distinctive things like sci-fi chess sets, pool showers made out of telephone boxes, Toby jugs and clown shoes. So that’s great too.

Unfortunately the distinctiveness of a Hitchcock movie, a Lowry painting or a Cole Porter lyric doesn’t seem to be the sort the report is getting at, because that’s a kind people really like. That would be entirely counterproductive to its stated aims. By “distinctiveness”, the report means that the BBC should deliberately target smaller and more niche audiences, in order to allow the commercial sector to take the bigger ones. Its distinctive flavour would be less like chicken liver and more like calves’ brains. Because that would be fairer on the market place.

This repellent tang is to be achieved in broadly three ways: the corporation should generate more content in less populist, and indeed less popular, genres; it should schedule programmes less aggressively; and it should take more risks in commissioning new ones. So Radio 1 should be more like Radio 1 Xtra, broadcasting more obscure music and talking. The news website should ditch entertainment and soft news stories in favour of in-depth analysis. And BBC1 should do arts documentaries in primetime, make more new programmes and stop using Strictly Come Dancing as a stick with which to beat The X Factor.

These aren’t terrible ideas. Aggressive scheduling is annoying. I’m sure many viewers, as well as ITV’s shareholders, take the view that, if the BBC were to rise above the fray and schedule Strictly Come Dancing at a time that doesn’t clash with The X Factor, it would be serving the public better. And the notion of more primetime arts, science and history programming, more analytical journalism, and more risk-taking new commissions is metaphorical music to ears that scorn Radio 2’s literal kind.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

But these ideas have not been arrived at in order to improve the BBC, but specifically to make it do less well. The report doesn’t advocate highbrow content despite the fact that it might not be popular, but because of it. If a new BBC1 documentary about Turgenev for 7 o’clock on Saturday nights turned out to be a runaway ratings winner, then that, too, should be axed and replaced by something else.

The report’s authors advocate greater risk-taking specifically in the hope that such risks do not pay off. For them, the only risk is that they do. If the distinctiveness they claim is vital were actually to be enjoyed by more people than the corporation’s current output, then ITV, Sky and Channel 5 would be complaining about that and then the culture secretary would have to commission a report calling for more blandness, less risk-taking and more audience-despising primetime bilge.

This puts the BBC in an almost impossible position. How can a broadcasting institution be expected deliberately to perform less well than it’s capable of? To put shows on at a certain time, when it knows more people would watch them at another time? To stop making its most popular programmes and not merely take risks on new shows that might not be so popular, but on ones that had better bloody not be or there’ll be hell to pay in Whitehall? This is like telling a boxer to throw a fight and make it look realistic. And what’s to be the corporation’s reward – its equivalent of a bookie’s massive bribe? At most, to limp through charter renewal with comparatively little further pummelling. For now.

The BBC is under unprecedented political pressure, its morale is low and those who work for it and run it are understandably asking the question: what do we have to do to assuage our critics, to be allowed to continue? This report’s answer can be summed up in one word: fail. Fundamentally that is the requirement. “More distinctive” is just a way its authors have found of saying “less successful” – but which they think will nevertheless sound vaguely positive to media wankers who flatter themselves they’re creative. Idiots with clever-sounding jobs can nod along with the uncontroversial-seeming concept of distinctiveness and are very unlikely to bother working out what it actually means.

It will be a fight to get rid of the BBC. Of the nearly 200,000 people who responded to a government consultation also published last week, 81% said the BBC was serving its audience “well or very well”. People still like it, they still consume its services more than any other broadcaster’s and so, crucially, they would miss it. This report is in favour of reducing its audience — but, according to Mark Oliver, one of the study’s authors, “would still leave BBC reach at a level that would be sufficient to maintain support for the licence”.

Maybe it would. For now. But this report makes the strategy of those commercially or ideologically opposed to the BBC startlingly clear. An overt challenge to the corporation’s existence remains politically unfeasible — the public would miss it too much. The first step, then, is to turn it into something that fewer people would miss – and eventually, over time, to make it so distinctive that hardly anyone likes it at all.