The point was, I think, that they did actually find plenty of positive things to say about Helene, as did Nick (who actually said that AS needed someone in his organisation who understood corporate culture).

Somewhat in contrast to the evry negative sentiment that is usually expressed here.

Also we have no idea how much the boardroom was edited last week. The 'I dont know what you do' bit could have been the only bad thing said to her.

Im not saying she definatly wasnt slated, but if she hadnt have been and we saw her praised where would the drama be in knowing that Micheal was definatly going? Last weeks boardroom through editing (or possibly real events) went from foregone conclusion to almost possible shock Micheal staying!

In addition, one incident aside, Helene has proved that she is the best communicator and is most capable in dealing in the business world and speak

I agree. I think Lucinda was deliberately being obtuse and putting it on. At first they were just squabbling a bit and then it was Lucinda who was the one who made a melodrama out of it by shouting out "How Dare You?", then that just fired Helene up.
A lot of people have held that against Helene ever since.

I say this whilst liking Lucinda a lot. But I don't think that she's always innocent.
I don't believe that crap about not knowing how to use a mobile phone or not having operated a computer before.
She's an excellent manager, but just doesn't like being managed and has often been difficult with several team leaders.

As for Sara, all Helene did was criticise Sara's sales technique, which was fair, even though Helene herself admits that she isn't a good seller. But what she said about Sara when they were all fighting to survive was completely fair.

Not to forget that Helene has stuck up for Sara before when she didn't even need to.

I think that she's fair. Or at least that she believes that she's being fair. I don't think she's a petty bully who will have a go at somebody for the sake of it.

Lee has been much worse but has apparently gotten away with it on here.

I'm not so sure that she did lie.
We don't really know the timeline of events and what hasn't been shown.
Helene doesn't often lie so I don't know why she would on a one off.

How do we know that it wasn't Lucinda who was lying?

From what we've seen we see Lucinda say she doesn't know how to do anything, but it's quite possible that earlier she may have said that she did know but changed her mind later.

I like both Lucinda and Helene, but I don't believe that Lucinda is an angel. I think she can be very prone to making life difficult for others if she wants to. And this is a game where people are competing with each other.

I think that there's been occasions where she's tried it on with some people and then got her fingers burnt when they didn't fall for it.

I like her, but I do think that she has a manipulative side where she's passive aggressive and plays the melodramatic martyr thing. I felt sorry for her when it has backfired and she was upset, but I think that there have been a couple of occasions where she deliberately messed somebody about and they weren't having it.

I'd like to be managed by her and be more than happy for her to be the boss, but I definitely wouldn't want to manage her.

I like Lucinda but don't be fooled into thinking Lucinda is a victim of bullying that some people think has happened.

True that many did not take her seriously at the start & good on her for sticking in but as I have always said that these two are strong people with differant ways to dealing things.
Lucinda can give us good us she gets as proved with Jenny & Jennifer.

Well that's the thing,..the edits.
I'm not going to say it's BAD editing, it's actually excellent editing in respect to telling a story they want to tell. Which may have an element of truth to it, but will be spun one way or another.

For example the edits have been absolutely useless tools for us to determine the winner in previous series. I think that the majority has always been wrong in their general prediction.

I really believe that there's a good case for all 5 candidates to win.
The only thing is that I can't discount the story that Claire has been trying to get on reality shows in the past. If that's true then I'd say Claire has zero chance of winning.

In fact, going by past experience, it's possible that the candidates who have had the most airtime are possibly the least likely to win if you based the final result on previous series.
Any candidate where you find yourself asking "What have they done?" will probably win if we go by the last three series.

I agree that clever editing can give a very different impression to reality, but to speculate on what might or might not have been said without any evidence simply muddies the waters further.

That's true to an extent but it is certainly possible to extrapolate based on what we do see and on common sense. One example might be noting that Helene was the first to pipe up about Lucinda being a good team leader on the ice cream task days later which suggests that whatever was said and done, there was no residual bitterness.

It was not all down to the editing. Helene admitted that she got dragged into that environment and that is why she behaved badly sometimes. I admire her for recognising that her behaviour was not always acceptable. Perhaps others behaved worse than Helene but were not given the same edit.

I still don't think that she deserves to win. I was hoping that they would convince us that she earned her place in the finals but they didn't.

Can I just ask - are any of the posters at the beginning of this thread ex-candidates - there seems to be a lot of factual detail in their arguments, which I can't remember at all - should I have been watching it more closely! Brangdon, in particular, I would guess to be closely related to the thread subject.
I liked Helene at first, especially after the kitchen task when she got down to it, and stood up for Sara. However, as a PM, no matter whether Lucinda had set fire to the computer and photoshopped a jaunty beret to all of the photos (a bit of a leap for a technophobe I admit), there is nothing that would justify the way Helene talked to her and about her on camera, and to me that shows that she doesn't have the maturity or gravitas to do the job (not that she won't get it, just that she shouldn't). Can you imagine Margaret reacting like that - surely if they want to be good business women, she is the benchmark. Shouty haranguing people don't inspire, or get the job done, they demotivate and are the worst thing for any team.

But that's what the whole thing is. The entire series is one big sea of muddy water.

What you seem to be saying is that we should take everything at face value.

All I'm saying is to keep an open mind and don't necessarily accept everything at face value.

You don't need any 'evidence' to know that what we see about half an hour of a task that takes however long it takes to film.

The scenes we are speaking about I think are about six of one, half a dozen of the other.
I think you also have to balance this with the many shots of both Lucinda and Helene getting on really well and laughing and smiling with each other. I don't think that many people noticed that because there is a tendency to focus mainly on 'incidents'.
But if you keep your eye out in episodes after this particular one those shots are there in the background. But as they aren't the main focus of the editing then the forum tends to ignore them and concentrate on where the edited highlights encourage us to focus our attention.

The show is all about highlights, but highlights can't possibly tell the full story.
So yes, I believe that we can speculate on what or what might not have been said even if we don't have 'evidence'. We don't need evidence because we know that we only get tiny snapshots out of a timeframe. The remainder being one huge blank space which we don't know about.

For example, the Helene/Lucinda argument.
We are just taken straight into the middle of it where we see them bickering and being snarky with each other. We don't know what led up to that. But something must have led up to it. So we don't need 'evidence' to know that there was something which led up to that, and also something which came after that where they must have come to some kind of truce for them to even complete the task.

I think the Lucinda/Helene argument gave us a real reflection of their relationship. After the round 1 during the task, they had round 2 in the boardroom. They also had round 3 in the boadroom of the ice cream task when helene said to Lucinda: If there is anyone I hadn't been able to work with, it would have been you which sums up there relationship really. They are both professionals (to some extent) and they are willing to put their feelings behind them during the tasks.

Remember Katie and kristina last year, I was astonished to find that they even hate each other more in reality. The same applies to Jadine/Tre and Rory/Tre.

I think in many cases the edit does reflect the relationship between the candidates. I tend to suspect the edit when the one of candidates does something overly stupid, and not mentioned again in the boadroom. Then I know that there was a strong reason for the candidate to do what he did.

Whilst I was watching last nights profile programme I was racking my brains to see if Helene had stood out at all. The only times I can remember her at all is during the ice cream episode, the way she spoke to Lucinda during the photograph episode and last weeks, where she stood around like a spare part. She's not exactly memorable but I wouldn't go as far as to call her a bully, that title you could place on either of the 2 females that were fired in the same week.

Well, of course, I can see that all the footage definitely showed is that Helene said something that was not correct; only Helene herself knows for certain whether this was intentional or not. But I'm afraid I just can't see her forgetting. Let's assume you're right, and she wasn't deliberately sabotaging her own team by putting Lucinda in the computer role; let's assume she genuinely thought Lucinda could do the job. I feel that in that case, when Lucinda turned out to be every bit as useless as she said she was, wouldn't Helene have started thinking "Oh crap, she said she was no good at this". I just can't see it slipping her mind when it was such a major failing in the team's performance.


Actually, I agree. All Sara's opinions during the product selection process were also voiced by others, so it's unlikely she affected anything there, and of course she sold no cakes. Her absence would have made no difference at all.

However, in my opinion Michael's absence could have made a difference - for the better! Without him to suggest it, Helene might not have divided the team as she did. This might well have led to a better selection, though it would have depended who actually looked at the dresses. As regards the selling, Michael was no more successful than Sara.

Helene's absence might also have made a difference, one way or the other; it would have depended who took the role of PM instead. But if they had made the decisions she did, then I'd say the same as I say for Helene; fire them.

[quote=Alrightmate;24188723]I agree. I think Lucinda was deliberately being obtuse and putting it on. At first they were just squabbling a bit and then it was Lucinda who was the one who made a melodrama out of it by shouting out "How Dare You?", then that just fired Helene up.
A lot of people have held that against Helene ever since.

I say this whilst liking Lucinda a lot. But I don't think that she's always innocent.
I don't believe that crap about not knowing how to use a mobile phone or not having operated a computer before.
She's an excellent manager, but just doesn't like being managed and has often been difficult with several team leaders.[quote]

I'm not entirely dismissive of that as a possibility, actually. It does seem a little improbable that Lucinda could be quite so incompetent. I just think it was daft to take the risk, unless Helene deliberately wanted Lucinda to screw up.


I don't blame Helene for trying to save herself, and in fact I thought she seemed to feel a little regretful back in the house. It was Sir Alan I blamed for the decision he made, and for not really giving Sara a proper chance to put her case.

You're also right that Helene seemed to stick up for Sara in the restuarant task. I never saw her treat Sara badly at all, and I was slightly surprised when Sara said in a newspaper interview that she'd felt Helene had disliked her. However, since Sara was actually there, and we only saw an edited version, it's fair to assume she must have some reason for feeling this.

I'm saying nothing of the sort - and if you reread my post you will appreciate that I do not accept everything at face value.

but nor do I allow my imagination to run away with me and speculate on "this might have happened, that might have happened."

You acknowledge huge gaps we know nothing of - yet use this blackhole to creat your own scenario; - and speculation is just that guesswork and hypothesis. It's almost like schoolchildren being given the opening paragraph to a story, then told "finish it off in your own words." Each child will come up with a different scenario - each one down to imagination.

tbh I think I am the one with an open mind i.e. I don't base my opinion on conjecture.

but hey - it's only tv - neither my life nor yours will be affected by the outcome!

S'r Alan, Margaret and Nick are all there to keep us guessing because this is an enterainment programme, not a business programme. Margaret was quoted as saying something nice about Lucinda a few weeks ago ... and she presumably knew by then that Lucinda had gone.

They'll say anything to obfuscate the issue because, if it was a foregone conclusion who would win, we wouldn't watch.

Privately, they know, as most of the rest of us do, that ALL these candidates are complete tossers, though some are nicer than others.

^^^

I don't think s/he was suggesting that Helene would win but rather pointing out that she could not be dismissed as a result of that weeks boardroom.

As it turned out she's made the final four so assumptions of her demise in the interview round were incorrect.

She appears to have NOTHING apart from her bloody story that she has worked for a hard nose company dominated by men for 7 years.

I suspect she has spent more time over the desk then sitting behind it.

I do think Helene has shown that she is very capable.

One thing we know for certain is that she is a liar. Remeber when she claimed in the boardroom not to have criticised somebody (can't remember whom precisely), despite the fact that she did so on camera?

I do not like the way Helene has talked down to Lucinda - she was extremely aggressive towards her in the early episodes. Lucinda said that she wasn't particularly IT literate and Helene didn't take any notice when dishing out job roles. She was also rude to her during the next task, apparently for no good reason, clearly harbouring a grudge. I wasn't particularly impressed by Lucinda initially, but that didn't stop me shouting abuse at the tv screen when Helene behaved badly towards her.

As I recall, the comments she made on camera were not about the person Lucinda was referring to.

Is that right? I have a vague memory of everybody jumping on that comment of Helene's straight away and saying that she had indeed said as much on camera.

If not, then I retract that particular allegation.

Shes definitely a bit of a bitch to be honest. She was also pretty awful to Lucinda during the photography task.
I mean, why as PM would you put someone who is awful with computers and give them an IT role.

It seemed to be like they were all trying to stitch her up if they lost the task.

Surely if you are in a team everyone should be trying to help..The whole premise of being in a team has been missed.

She certainly didn't get hired for her looks has she? Though I suspect she also has the skill of 'looking busy' than doing any work imo.