Don’t we all need some solace these days — some good old glitzy solace? Thank goodness, then, for Cheryl Cole, the big-eyed, big-haired, big-hearted girlband member, who is now the sweetheart of a Saturday-night reality-TV show. If these are times for the blitz spirit, we’ve just found our Vera Lynn.

Watching The X Factor has previously been a grubby pleasure, something we all did in secret. The judges have always been the problem, a morally skewed lot, whether a knot of repression (Louis Walsh), a freak of surgery (Sharon Osbourne) or a champion of vapidity (Simon Cowell). With Osbourne out and Cheryl in, the shame of watching The X Factor has vanished. The show has become our comfort food, the acceptable antidote to the credit crunch and Sarah Palin fear — because everyone has fallen in love with Cheryl.

Watch her when someone else is talking: you can see sly smiles twitching on her lips. You know the girl’s a conspiratorial laugh. I met her once at a friend’s birthday. She’d just had her hair cropped short then, so we asked her about her extensions. Apparently, she still had them in. Holding up a clump, she said: “I’m addicted to the thickness!” This has since become our mantra. I know three people who now get their extensions done at the same place as Cheryl. One of them is male.

It is strange that we have had a celebrity relationship with Cheryl for years, yet it is only now she has turned into the sort of circulation-guaranteeing gold that sees her on the front of every weekly magazine. Maybe it is because her wardrobe has taken years to settle, with too many cowboy hats and thigh boots worn with miniskirts in the past. She has learnt from her mistakes and bought much of her X Factor wardrobe of chic separates herself. Her outfit for her live-show debut was way ahead of trend: leopard print and disco-shiny leggings are spring/summer 2009, like a mix of next season’s Christopher Kane and Balenciaga. It made Minogue’s drapery seem a nightmare of excess cloth.

Another cause for caution has been her 2003 court case for racially aggravated assault. She was cleared of that, but found guilty of assault, and this has caused wariness about her temper. Subsequent celebrity spats have made us warm to her, because she always seems to talk in plain truths (“She says I’m a bad role model? Well, what kind of role model does she think she is?” she threw at Ulrika Jonsson). Cheryl’s loyalty to her cheating husband, Ashley, has been criticised by some, but her message of commitment prompts some sort of sympathy in many women.

Now, on The X Factor, she is displaying Obama-like calm. It’s obvious that puppet master Cowell wants her to lash out at Walsh, her former manager, and have a cat fight with Minogue.

There are still seven weeks in which blood can be spilt, but it seems Cheryl will rise above.

She first found fame on a similar programme. Her band, Girls Aloud, were formed on Popstars: The Rivals in 2002 — one of the canniest creations in pop.

Their success has been a slow-burn affair: the gays have always loved them, but when Arctic Monkeys covered them, it became clear the music establishment was on board. Now women love them, too, as proven by the success of the latest of their equal-opportunity singles, The Promise. Cowell, it has been reported, is so desperate to sign Cheryl to the next series of The X Factor, he has doubled her salary, but she won’t do it if it clashes with Girls Aloud’s American tour. Girls like girls who like loyalty.

The clincher here is empathy. While the show’s presenter, Dermot O’Leary, seems to struggle with the innate cruelty of the programme, Cheryl understands the desire for fame that drives contestants to apply. She also knows how hard life is as a finalist, the fear of getting chewed up and spat out by the show, the horror of being publically dressed down and insulted by the judges, of missing a note on live television, of seeing all your dreams shattered.

Having Cheryl on the show means we can become complicit in this warped world — she is on the side of the good guys, and the living, breathing example of how it call all go right. That helps us to forget our own reality.

But Cheryl needs to keep on her toes. Girls Aloud will split sooner rather than later, and she needs to time her exit with aplomb. There is another footballer’s wife who was once in a girlband, and she now survives as a parody of herself. The blankness of Victoria Beckham should be her marker of how not to progress. Cheryl needs to stay in three dimensions, for all our sakes.

Times recommends

• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?
• Video: How to do glamorous smoky eyes