Anderson Cooper has fought “to forget” the time Madonna spanked him onstage when she dragged him out of the crowd at one of her concerts in 2015.

The broadcaster, 56, admitted he is still “mortified” about being hit and humped by the Queen of Pop, 65, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which also saw him stunned when the singer handed him a banana during her performance of ‘Unapologetic B****’ in front of 18,000 cheering fans.

He told Kelly Ripa’s ‘Let’s Talk off Camera’ podcast: “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was terrible. I danced terribly. It was mortifying.”

“I open (the banana) up and I start to peel it and eat it. And then all of a sudden, I start lowering down on this little electronic elevator disappearing on the stage just, like, eating this banana.

“To this day, I don’t know what happened.”

Madonna referred to her old friend Anderson’s awkward reaction to her dance moves during a December 2017 episode of ‘Live with Kelly and Ryan’, telling him on the show: “I want to talk about something that you weren’t good at. I’ve danced with you at nightclubs (and) you were very free and cool. And then when you got on stage, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’

Anderson responded to her teasing: “It’s one thing dancing with you at a nightclub – it’s intimate and stuff. (But) in the Barclays Center with all these people… you didn’t just dance with me, you bent me over, you slapped me, you did something else to me and then you handed me a banana.”

He admitted he was “thrilled” to “walk into the CNN newsroom” after being “humped on a stage by Madonna”.

Madonna was forced to postpone her much-hyped ‘Celebration Tour’ after she was hospitalised in June with a “serious bacterial infection”, but has since told fans it will now be kicking off in October as she continues to recover at her New York home.