I think Stella benefitted being in a series where so many candidates crumbled and lost the plot. Meanwhile Stella remained a consistent and dependable voice of reason.
I think towards the end Joanna came close to rivalling Stella as my favourite but that's when Stella's attempts to break through her icy exterior were becoming entertaining in their own right.
Plus she had a funny love/hate relationship with the most controversial candidate of the series, Stuart, which further propelled her to being the 'good guy' in a series full of chaos.

I've said a lot of times that my biggest issues with Series 6 was that very few of the candidates were really eligible to win. Stella, Chris and Liz were all competent, but were overqualified to be an apprentice, as was shown with Stella in the aftermath of the show. Joanna and Jamie both had existing projects of their own to work on (I can't remember what Jamie did, but Joanna had her own cleaning business, and I think Jamie had something similar as well). Stuart was never going to win. It is commonly known that I hold the controversial opinion that the winner should have been Laura, and that is because although she wasn't a stunner on any of the tasks, it was clear that she had some basic business skills, she could learn and develop from Lord Sugar and she was better apprentice material than any of the people who went further than her in the series.

I don't know whether it says more about the editing or the quality of the other candidates that year (or both), but there really didn't seem to be any point where it looked like anyone except Stella was going to win. The only one who looked to have any chance of stopping her was Joanna, and Sugar doesn't seem to go for women with such volatile temperaments. Liz also did exceptionally well on the selling to the trade task and won as project manager the next week, but then had a really horrible run of tasks and left it too late to get back into the game (even with the whole situation around Baggs the Brand).

In fairness to Joanna, there was only one task (the holiday product task) where she appeared to have a volatile temperament. On every other task, she seemed very personable. I'd rather have had a Joanna win than a Stella win, but she already had a very successful business.

Actually, I've been thinking about what BigDaveX said about it being obvious that Stella would win, and I think it was quite a lot like that in JA1 as well. From Arjun's edit, it was fairly obvious from quite early on that he was destined for the win - in my opinion, anyway. Tim and Kirsty were great, but didn't really ever seem like they were going to win from the edit, even though they may have deserved it. Zoe may have had more of a chance - she was certainly the most memorable candidate - but she was very much a love-her-or-hate-her kind of character, and they don't usually get it.

Think that both Joanna and Liz had glorious moments in certain episodes that beat "leading the boys to victory by parading in a bikini"

Think that Stella had a fair few dodgy episodes in the second part of the series, so the editing can't have been that good (even in the foreign task, it was Joanna who for me was the best candidate on that team).




Well, I wouldn't like to get on the bad side of Yasmina or Leah either.

Funnily enough though, Joanna seemed to be only one in the house who actually got along with Stella (which might have been a clue to Sugar).




Well, in the last 2 tasks she was not responsible for the loss (and 2 out of the 3 people who were did make it to the interview stage, so....). It was hardly a Melody case of escaping time after time.

Though offcourse she was toast when they showed that post boardroom clip in episode 9 (and the editing team did pronounce Stella the winner there). The infamous series 4 post boardroom clip was vicious, but this was also "great" manipulation.