Is there anything in life, apart from Charles Dickens novels, that is - and Stephen Poliakoff dramas, and Newcastle United - in which the gap between hype and reality is as large as it is with the “business dinner”?

The invitations always make them sound so glamorous. I went the other day to a banquet that, as promised, had several pop stars, sports stars and leading chief executives attending. But, as ever, the experience was about as thrilling as owning HBOS shares.

I guess that one of the things that makes them so routinely arduous is the speeches. These are always tedious in the case of small business dinners because organisers cannot afford celebrity speakers and therefore rely on industry figures who drone on, and tedious in the case of grander banquets because the organisers can afford celebrity speakers and you will therefore have heard the whole routine several times before.

If I have to spend one more evening listening to a member of the Dragons’ Den panel recounting hilarious anecdotes about what can go wrong when making television programmes, I swear I shall hack the bone out of the rubber chicken on my plate and stab myself through both eyes.

Which brings us to another fundamental problem with business banquets: the food and drink. Mass catering is by definition uninspiring, but mass business catering is particularly bad because it is rendered so expensive by caterers who feel obliged to overcharge.

Mark Lloyd, an organiser of such events, explains that one popular hotel in London’s Mayfair charges £31 a bottle for its house wine (which would cost a fiver from a wholesaler), £56 for a bottle of champagne and £70 per head for a three-course dinner. This works out at about £120 a head for what is, at best, a mediocre meal. “With most of the events I’ve been involved with, the client has had to opt for the cheapest wine and food on the menu,” Lloyd says.

Even so, the lame nosh would, in itself, be tolerable if there weren’t so many business banquets to attend. I used to think that I got a lot of invitations because of my job, but it’s actually a problem for everyone in business. According to ukindustryawards.com, there are now at least 950 business-related award ceremonies every year, with recent highlights including the Limousine Industry Awards (bet it was easy to get a lift home) and the Organic Food Awards (at least the rubber chicken would have had a nice life). When you add these to the innumerable annual dinners hosted by trade bodies such as the CBI, you could literally attend a business banquet every night of your life.

However, even this prospect would not, in itself, be so hellish if the events were a little cosier. Take the 2008 Sign Industry Awards (bet no one had problems finding the hotel), which, as I’m sure you know, took place in Coventry this month. According to the event’s website, between 400 and 500 people turned up to see who would triumph in categories such as “Sign of the Year”. That’s a lot of people, but it’s actually small compared with many banquets - for instance, the Great Room in the Grosvenor House hotel in Park Lane, scene of some of the longest evenings of my life, can play host to 2,000 people.

What organisers do not seem to realise is that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the number of invitees and the quality of an event. And once you exceed 200 people, not enough thought can be put into seating plans, invitations get sent out randomly by companies who buy tables and forget to fill them until a week before the event, and the sheer number of people milling around means that invitees do not get quality time with anyone important and spend the evening suspended in a state of existential angst.

Indeed, the most annoying thing about my dinner was not that the friend who had persuaded me to go in the first place didn’t turn up, or that I was stuck next to a small man with terrible breath, but that no one noticed that my friend hadn’t arrived, and it struck me halfway through the third speech of the evening that no one would have cared if I hadn’t turned up, either.

Attending a business banquet is essentially an exercise in making yourself invisible. The conversation, because of the potential offence you could cause to someone important, or to the spouse of someone important, has to remain bland. You have to dress in a uniform that makes you indistinguishable from everyone else, including the waiters. And, essentially, you are there to make up numbers.

If I ever robbed a bank and needed to disappear for a while, I would simply put on a DJ and spend my days flitting between business functions in Park Lane, passing my card to people in a dead-eyed fashion. The chances of being found would be minimal.

I know that defenders of the business dinner would argue that they are useful for networking purposes, and point out that a lot of money is raised for charity at such events, via raffles and auctions. But there are quicker and more efficient ways to network, and although charity is a mitigating factor, there are surely more dignified ways of supporting good causes.

In January, one item auctioned during a retail industry dinner at the Grosvenor House raised £40,000, which is fabulous. However, I can’t help thinking how much better it would have been if the donation had been made less publicly, or even if the donation hadn’t been made at all, and the people who paid up to £750 a head to be there, had instead donated that cash. The charity would have still got its money, fewer chickens would have been rubberised, and many hundreds of people could have done something more useful with their evening. Such as reading a Dickens novel.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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