Yes Melody was out of control last night and has flagged up some very serious concerns.
But lets not lose sight of why she's still in the competition - its becouse Leon was spectacularly crap and has no real strong performances previously.
I'd even say the much loved Tom should have gone before Melody on tonights perfromance. Though maybe a triple firing could have been the ideal solution - its what the Dalai Lama would have done

Yeh - so do I.

There's no clear-cut villain this time, so AS has had to give us a bit of a nudge by keeping on control freak Jim when he could easily got rid of him if he was so against him, and by seemingly backing Melody's self-serving behaviour at the expense of the team. She was the candidate with the clear advantage (psychologicaly) this week, and she acted just as they'd hoped (and more!) and given us all something to talk about.

After all, no-one's talking about Leon, are they?

What, like Wotherspoon, Sophocles, and Baggs?

Look at a previous winner like Michelle Dewbury as one example, Badger was surely better?

No surprise that old Sugarlumps likes someone who is not a team player and uses other people. Don't forget that in previous series he backed someone who had lied on his CV.
Tells you all you need to know.

Thats the popular view. But I always thought Ruth a one trick pony - a formidable selling machine but lacked people skills and she heself admitted to having little creativity. Shugs can hire sales people by the dozen.
It was unfortunate that year that the actual job Shugs had for Michelle was particulary crappy - something to do with computer recycling that never took off. I doubt Ruth would have been any happier in that role.

That's exactly what i saw and thought too

It was Lee McQueen who lied big time on his resume and still got the job. It was embarrassing watching him in the last 2 (I think it was) cos he made such a tit of himself when he got collared on it. And then he got the job. LOL.

Sugarlumps is weird. He might let Susan win this one simply because she is pretty. LOL.

We're only shown two answers in the programme. One person is positive about the seat and negative about the teapot (and this is relayed accurately to Leon), and one person is positive about the seat and says nothing about the teapot (and this is relayed inaccurately to Leon).

Extrapolating out from that what the majority of people Melody asked said about either product is probably as foolish as deciding that nobody drives in Paris from 4 people in a Metro station saying they don't.

It's also worth bearing in mind that Tom never says that Melody's market research influenced his decision in the slightest. He actually seems supremely disinterested in it, (and says later that he thought that Melody was asking the wrong questions anyway), as he should have been. The actual reason he turns down the seat is a nonsense one - he doesn't think any of his team will sell it with any enthusiasm compared to the teapot.

The whole 'market research' thing is a bit of a red herring that seems to be necessitated by the programme's format.

We see, time and time again, people sent off to do market research whilst the 'home' team actually have to start designing/selecting the product so that by the time the market research is reported they will already have a good idea of what they want and one or other of the sub team's work will end up unused or invalidated.

I do wonder how much market research Jim and Helen did. We're shown them asking one woman in the street about the seat, but that's it, and they seem to be on their way to somewhere else at the time. I would love it if Jim and Helen fulfilled that "requirement" of the task by door-stepping one woman in the street on the way to the cafe where they had croissants and Jim made their appointments.