Perhaps you remember Michael Bentine’s classic “football results” sketch. The one where he starts off reading the scores in a measured way but gradually becomes excited, and then hysterical, as one after another of the draws on his own coupon come up.

Well, something similar happened last week at the European Educational Research Association conference, held in tandem with the French research association. And this time it was for real.

The setting was the Grand Palais in Lille, venue for a discussion on European research networks. Playing the Bentine character - though he did not know it - was a middle-aged interpreter hired to translate the French researchers’ dauntingly abstract speeches for the headphone-wearing English-speakers.

The first sign that something was amiss was the interpreter’s heavy sigh at the close of the first speech. Halfway through the next address it became obvious that he was at the end of his tether. After one tortuous passage stuffed with references to “epistemic drift” and “the heterogeneity of configurations” he blurted out: “It would help eef the interpreter had the text that the speaker ees reading from.” A torrent of untranslated, polysyllabic words flowed past him but he no longer seemed to care.

By now he had started to vary the speed of his translation. One minute galloping along like Peter O’Sullevan describing the Grand National, then slowing down and sounding as bored as a 14-year-old on holiday with his parents.

To his credit, he carried on to the end, but by the closing stages he was slipping more comments into the translation. “Thees ees at the upper limits of intelligibility,” he protested as his listeners began to exchange disbelieving smiles. “Ees thees going to be published?” It was a bizarre episode, but wholly in keeping with the rest of the conference, which was, by some distance, the most chaotic gathering the research community has ever experienced. And that, as anyone who has been to a research conference will testify, is no mean feat.

Several researchers who had prepared papers for the conference were omitted from the programme, sessions were cancelled without warning and others were relocated to rooms that did not exist. Even Aberdeen University’s John Nisbet, Scotland’s over-75s orienteering champion, lost his way in Lille University’s maze of subterranean passages. “I’ve been attending conferences for 50 years and I’ve never known such chaos,” he said.

After two days many researchers decided they had had enough. For several, the last straw was the pound;20-a-head conference dinner, or lack of it. It was the kind of meal that Nietzsche would have loved because it would have confirmed all his prejudices. “In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is bad,” he once wrote.

First, the researchers were bussed to a sports centre in a ghost town built for students. Then they had to wait nearly an hour for a drink. The first course - a cheese sandwich - arrived 10 minutes later.

Having endured all this, and a very loud jazz band, hysteria set in during the interminable, mid-dinner speeches when speaker after speaker heaped praise on the conference’s French organiser, Professor Raymond Bourdoncle.

Then someone made the mistake of announcing that the first of the home-bound coaches had arrived - and that the next one would not arrive for another two hours. The stampede even drowned out the band and left the waiters wondering what to do with 100 unwanted puddings.

Outside, one naively optimistic English researcher tried to get his fellow escapees to form an orderly queue. But these were desperate people.

Did the conference have no redeeming features? Well historians, vocational education researchers, comparative educationists, philosophers and other specialists got a lot out of it, partly because they spent most of their time in their own mini-conferences.

Masochists also had a whale of a time. Bob Moon, professor of education at the Open University, was billeted 50kms from the university because Lille’s hotels were full. But he still managed to chair an 8.30am session. “It attracted three people and a poodle,” he said cheerfully. “I’m pleased the poodle could make it.”

Other conference-goers will be less forgiving, however. Martyn Lawn, EERA’s secretary general, may believe that his association needs “immutable mobiles, all those things which provide continuity, sustenance and help it to hold its shape as it travels through virtual space”.

But he now knows EERA members also have more basic needs. They want, and deserve, a well-run conference in a welcoming venue, a programme that provides accurate information, decent food and accessible accommodation. Unless they get all of these things at their conference in Lisbon next year, EERA may not survive. What a pity that would be.