B ack 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).…