Cheryl has won the internet again – but there is real heartbreak behind her comeback

Back in 2012, Cheryl Cole reflected on her whirlwind ascent to stardom as part of the nation’s favourite girl band in the documentary Girls Aloud: Ten Years at the Top. “Slowly but surely, you start to realise, ‘actually, I can’t nip to the garage in my pyjamas any more for a pint of milk, even if I want to,’” she told the interviewer.

More than a decade later, her throwaway remark about finding herself in the glare of the paparazzi cameras, delivered in her signature sing-song Geordie tones, ended up going viral on Instagram and TikTok (platforms that were either in their infancy or didn’t even exist back in the singer’s Girls Aloud heyday).

Why has this moment proved so popular online? Perhaps because it’s pure Our Cheryl (which seems like the easiest way to refer to her, although she’s had a few surnames in her time – Tweedy, Cole and Fernandez-Versini – before defaulting to mononym status). In the clip, she’s still straight-talking and grounded, even if she is far too famous to pop out to the Shell round the corner in her dressing gown.

It was candour like this that helped cement her status as the People’s Princess 2.0 back in the late Noughties and early 2010s, when Cheryl, with her doe eyes and L’Oreal-approved mane of brown hair, was a fixture of Saturday night telly, the sweetest judge on the X Factor panel.

Now, after a series of knockbacks and tragedies prompted her to spend years away from the public eye, Cheryl is making a tentative comeback – and harnessing the power of the meme herself. Yesterday, the 43-year-old unveiled a Deliveroo campaign, rumoured to be worth around £500,000, to mark Tesco’s debut on the delivery app, riffing on that old clip.

In the ad, she jokes that she no longer needs to worry about heading to the shops in her PJs – because she can just stick a pint on her Deliveroo order, and have one arrive at her door. “I can’t believe it’s still doing the rounds,” she said of the viral moment, “but we’ve had a good laugh giving it a glow up all these years later”.

Safe to say it has gone down well with her fans. “The idea behind this is iconic,” one wrote on Instagram, while another hailed it as “genius marketing”. British beauty creator Jake Jamie seemed to speak for them all when he declared in a comment: “The world is healing. The Cherylrenaissance has begun.”

It’s certainly proved a clever way to add momentum to her return to the spotlight, showing that she’s prepared to poke fun at herself and lean into her reputation as one of the UK’s top “huns”, while also reminding us all of the forthright Cheryl we fell in love with in the Noughties.

It’s not the only way that she has been harking back to her talent show glory days recently. Just a few weeks ago, she appeared as a guest mentor on ITV’s The Voice, teaming up with her old pal and musical collaborator will.i.am. It was the first time that she’d properly graced our screens in six years, following the end of her last show, BBC One’s The Greatest Dancer, in 2020.

This might not be her only foray back into TV, either. In August, The Sun reported that the singer is in discussions to make a documentary about her life and career, charting her rise from Popstars: The Rivals contestant to solo artist and X Factor star. “Cheryl is incredibly picky about what she chooses to do these days and spends a lot of time on motherhood, but she feels like she has a story to tell,” a source told the paper, adding that the singer “would also have creative control over the project”.

The look-back documentary has become something of a celebrity status symbol in recent years, allowing stars to have the last word on episodes from their past, and for audiences to reassess the way these famous figures were presented to us back then. They allow their subjects to be candid, but within a safer, less confrontational setting than a traditional media interview.

Robbie Williams, Kylie, plus David and Victoria Beckham have all bared (parts of) their souls in Netflix series recently, and Cheryl’s past would certainly provide plenty of material.

Raised on a council estate in Heaton, Newcastle, she seemed earmarked for stardom from a young age, winning various baby modelling contests, appearing in adverts and even winning the chance to spend a summer studying with the Royal Ballet, sponsored, in an ironic twist, by the tabloid The Daily Star.

When she was 19, she auditioned for Popstars: The Rivals, a talent show on the hunt for aspiring singers to mould into a girl band and a boy band. She made the cut as part of the group that would become Girls Aloud, beat the boys (One True Voice, remember them?) to snag a Christmas No 1 and was known for her straight-talking interview style.

The press attention only intensified when she started dating and eventually married England footballer Ashley Cole, making her one of our most recognisable WAGs, perhaps second only to Victoria Beckham. But it was when the tabloids repeatedly accused Ashley of cheating that the nation really took to her – she was no longer just another rich, perma-tanned popstar, but an emotionally bruised young woman to empathise with.

Her stint as an X Factor judge only seemed to endear her further to the public; when those big eyes filled with tears at some contestant’s sob story, it was near-impossible not to weep along with her. She was essentially the anti-Simon Cowell. “It’s not nice to watch someone squirming,” she said of her judging style. “You want to prevent people from suffering.”

Her solo music got off to a strong start, too (another, more coincidental aspect of the Cheryl comeback is this autumn’s strange renaissance of the red military jacket, which she famously wore in the video for her debut solo single “Fight for This Love”). But then came a series of knockbacks.

Not long after her divorce from Ashley, she was slated to appear as a judge on The X Factor USA, only to be replaced at the last minute by Nicole Scherzinger. She embarked on a whirlwind romance with the restaurateur Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini in 2014, marrying him after just three months, only for them to separate a year later.

By 2019, momentum in her music career seemed to have slowed to such an extent that her fifth album was quietly shelved. Around the same time, her long-term spokesperson deal with L’Oreal ended. These setbacks didn’t cause the public’s interest in her to wane, though – far from it. Instead, the ups and downs of Cheryl’s career and her personal life only seem to have made her a more compelling figure.

But personal tragedy has only prompted the singer, who was once happy to mouth off in interviews, to become far more conscious of her private life, and the way that her story is told.

Cheryl’s small steps back into the limelight come two years after the death of her former partner Liam Payne, the father of her nine-year-old son Bear, who fell to his death in Argentina in October 2024 at the age of just 31. This came just a few years after another sad, untimely passing of someone close to her: her former Girls Aloud bandmate Sarah Harding, who died of breast cancer in 2021 aged 39.

These heartbreaks seemed to prompt her to double down on her shift away from the entertainment industry, which started when she became a mum to Bear and continued during the pandemic, albeit with a brief return for Girls Aloud’s emotional reunion tour, which doubled as a celebration of Harding.

So why choose to return to the public eye now? Grief, of course, is never linear, but we can hope that her extended hiatus has given her the time to deal with those devastating bereavements in private, without feeling like she has to smile through it all (as she did while juggling The X Factor with marital breakdown all those years ago).

Plus, Bear is older now, too. According to a report in the Daily Mail, she’s keen for him to see his mum back at the top of her game. “Bear has never seen her on television, so how lovely would it be for him to see his mum on TV doing something she used to love?” a source told the paper when her Voice appearance was announced over the summer.

These past few years have certainly been gruelling for her, and perhaps she simply wants to have some fun, and play with nostalgia on her own terms. Her fans will certainly be rooting for her – whenever she’s ready, to paraphrase her old X Factor catchphrase.