Some scenes are so awkward to watch that they really shouldn’t be shown without a warning: “Contains appalling awkwardness.” Footage of a photo lineup at an EU summit last week was a case in point. Croatia’s foreign minister, Gordan Grlić-Radman, is shaking hands with his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, and leans forward to kiss her. She kind of turns away and this brief but harrowing pantomime concludes with a discordant peck on her right cheek.
The kisser acknowledged it was awkward and said it was merely “a human approach”; the Croatian women’s rights activist Rada Borić described the move as “highly inappropriate”; the kissee, Frau Baerbock, has to my knowledge passed no comment. And the whole sorry incident seems to have been forgotten.
But not by me. I can’t put it behind me. My toes won’t uncurl. Obviously, there may well have been gender politics at play here, but to me it looked daft rather than dangerous. Then again, I generally don’t have blokes I don’t know very well kissing me unbidden. In my case, partly to avoid any kissing confusion, I’ve tended instead to go in for hugs with women, which is probably even more intimate and therefore worse. No more. I never want to be in that bloke’s shoes, nor put any woman in the German foreign minister’s shoes.
Seriously, from now on, unless I am specifically told otherwise, there will be no hugs or kisses from me, only firm handshakes.
This hasn’t gone well so far. Filming something with Martin and Shirlie Kemp this week, I had to greet them on camera. I was a good five metres away when I thrust my hand forward in Shirlie’s direction. I saw with alarm that she was shaping up for a hug but by then it was too late for me to withdraw. Awkward, awkward, awkward. After a brief discussion we re-shot it with a hug. This was showbiz, after all.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
