Scarcely watchable, wildly over-remunerated, explicable only by conspiracy theories: how neat that John Inverdale's perennial criticisms of women's tennis should read like verdicts on himself.

The irony would be lost on John, of course, for whom subtlety will for ever be a closed book. But if the producers of next year's flagship Today At Wimbledon show are short of ideas – and on the form book, that seems the safest of bets – might I suggest that during Inverdale's opening monologue on day one of the 2014 championships, he is literally removed from the set. Getting the hook, they used to call it in vaudeville, after the practice of physically yanking bad acts off stage with an extended shepherd's crook.

It is several days since Inverdale blithely suggested that even the father of the Wimbledon women's champion thought she was "never going to be a looker", and his BBC employers must be delighted that Andy Murray's glorious win and the start of the Ashes will mask their inglorious failure to deal with Inverdale appropriately or consistently. Had he said something racist instead of something sexist, as we all know, he'd have been a million miles from the tennis the next day. As it was, he was back on Radio 5 live and at the helm of the nightly highlights show, looking for all the world like a man whose broadcasting credo is "What's wrong with being sexy?". Thus, short of farting out another montage of his chauvinistic "best bits", the BBC did all it could to reassure viewers that this sort of thing will stand.

Perhaps the greatest trick Inverdale has pulled is his apparent success in convincing his bosses that the Bartoli business was some form of clumsy aberration, when in fact it is entirely of a piece with the manner in which he has covered the sport since I can remember. Year after year, BBC One viewers and 5 live listeners are gifted his open distaste for the women's game, which apparently lacks anything to hold his well-remunerated attention. It's too noisy, it's boring, no one's heard of its players: no matter how many times he is called on such positions by John McEnroe – who understands something about making the sport engaging – out they are trotted again the next year.

To say Inverdale is not venerated by tennis fans is to offer the sort of understatement John is congenitally unable to essay. But perhaps his distaste for viewers whose interest in the game stretches beyond the annual fortnight is understandable, given Wimbledon's status as sport for people who don't like sport.

Less justifiable is his repeated insistence on effectively dismissing 50% of the sport he is paid to cover as interestingly as he can. High-ranking players are routinely described as people you've never heard of – he once described a world No1 as "anonymous" – while his efforts to engage other commentators in his obsession that equal prize money is a folly are tireless. Hats off to Mark Petchey for responding to this punditry gambit during ITV's French Open coverage by branding it "redundant", though I expect it got him flicked with a wet towel in the presenters' locker room later.

In isolation, such remarks are merely tedious or thick: in concert, they eventually come across as open distaste for women themselves.

Inverdale's hobby horses are ridden into the ground: the faux-arch queries as to whether the Williams sisters fix their matches, the grunting … Oh, the grunting! Even by the standards of a dire show whose reliance on witless gimmicks almost defines it, Today At Wimbledon scraped the barrel a few years back with "Gruntwatch". A dead-on-arrival nightly feature that reeked of being Inverdale's sole contribution to what we'll generously style as Today At Wimbledon's "ideas meeting", combining as it did a complete failure to engage with the actual sport with the basic presumption that it's at worst cheating, and at best massively unladylike.

I still recall the horror of one night's show actually opening with a David Attenborough impersonator, who breathed – over shots of female players – that Wimbledon was "home to a vast array of birdlife". It's quite a feat to make Alan Partridge sound like Andrea Dworkin, but one effectively achieved by the announcement that "there will be more of these magnificent animals on Gruntwatch".

As for the conspiracy theories as to how Inverdale stays in post, I draw more of a blank with the passing of each director general, as there must be a limit on how many men he can possess unspeakably depraved photos of. Perhaps the most credible explanation for his endurance is that getting rid of him for his attitude toward women would open the wriggliest can of worms. I wouldn't bet against a good 50% of the BBC's senior male pundits holding time-warped views, and – more perilously – being unhampered by the sort of filter that might hold them back from voicing them in a live broadcast. They're mostly saved by the fact that they commentate on sport where the only female you could conceivably see might be running the line.

So Inverdale sails on regardless, if you can ascribe qualities of forward progress to a broadcaster whose sole identifiable advance in recent years has been his eventually learning that one doesn't pronounce Djokovic "Joykovitch". Still, baby steps. And at this rate of progress, let's be glad that the BBC could decide his attitudes might be faintly backward as early as 2041.