Samantha Fox sings in Galicia regional language on TV

BRITISH model and pop singer Samantha Fox made a surprise appearance on a chat show on regional television this week – and sang for the audience in gallego.

Or at least, she tried, and has been lauded on social media for her valiant attempts.

The London-born voice behind the 1989 Stock, Aitken & Waterman hit I Only Wanna Be With You was guest artist on the programme Luar, on the local channel TVG based in Spain's far north-western region of Galicia, where presenter Xosé Ramón Gayoso bopped with Mrs Fox to one of her catchy numbers.

Samantha, 55, was joined on the show by actress Benedicta Sánchez, who won a Goya Award for Best New Actress in 2020 for her rôle in the hard-hitting drama Fire Will Come, or O Que Arde in the regional tongue.

Both ladies, along with the music band on set, gathered together in a rendition of the popular Galicia folk song Na Beira do Mar.

Samantha found herself rather at sea – or mar, in Spanish and gallego – but made a laudable effort to follow the lyrics on paper whilst guided by Xosé.

In the end, she had to admit defeat as she could not follow the words quickly enough, so she opted to 'cheerlead' the audience while Benedicta continued.

Gallego, known in the language itself as galego, holds co-official status in the region alongside the national language, Castilian Spanish, and is fairly close to Portuguese, largely due to the area's geographical location just to the north of the neighbouring country.

Although different in terms of spelling, and much of its grammar and vocabulary, galego is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish and is something of a 'linguistic bridge' between the two Iberian peninsula national languages.

And Samantha's valiant attempts did not go unnoticed on Twitter, where one user wrote: “Samantha Fox squeezed into an impossible corset, Gayoso dancing with her to rally the audience, translator in a muddle, Samantha more so, but smiling, whilst members of a folk-singing band danced to Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now. [The programme] Luar is dadaism [20th-century modern art], and you know it.”

Another wrote: “Luar is TV at its purest. It's like going back to 1980s' telly right into the 2020s. Decades on screen, and many more, hopefully, to come.”

As well as her string of upbeat pop singles – 29 in total, released on her six studio albums between 1986 and 2005 and her Live in Poland album of 2011, Samantha Fox has long been famous in Spain through a brief romance in her heyday with bullfighter Rafael Camino.

But despite having made a career in the mid-to-late 1980s as a 'sex symbol' for a male readership – posing naked and topless in Playboy and as a 'Page 3 Girl' in British tabloid The Sun – Mrs Fox revealed years later that she was bisexual and had been in a relationship with her manager Myra Stratton since 2003.

The couple married in 2009, when Samantha was 43 and Myra was 54, but their hopes of growing old together were dashed – Samantha was widowed aged 49, in August 2015, when Myra died from cancer aged 60.

A graduate of the Anna Scher Theatre School, it is not thought Samantha has had a serious relationship since the loss of her wife six years ago.