I would have agreed with that if the sales team was doing something at the time. The fact is that they stopped sales because they were unable to produce the photo. Therefore, no one would have blamed Helene for bringing one of the sales team as there was a good reason for it. Add to that she had one more member in her team.


Raef made a mistake on his second task as PM. He made absolutely no mistake in his first task as a PM. Every decision he took in that task was right. In his second task as PM, he was the only candidate to make use of Claire's experience in Marketing and pitching. He delegated very well and his campaign was very organised till the last minute when he took Michael's suggestion of removing the box shot. he didn't mess up the task as you said and he didn't make a management mistake. He made a mistake in his role as a director. At both tasks, he showed respect to his team mates and even in the boardroom he simply described the situation as it happened and admitted that he made the final decision.

Helene made a mistake in delegation in her first task as a PM. She repeated her mistakes again in her second task as a PM (a mistake that was pointed out to her in the first task). She didn't handle Lucinda very well and I think she was blaming others for the failure of the task.

The candidates at the beginning of the series are fresh and therefore we expect them to behave better and to perform better. As the series progresses, the pressure gets to candidates and therefore, their past contributions must be taken into account.

Raef's performance has demonstrated that he is a excellent PM. He was also a visible team player in most of the tasks. On the other hand, Helene didn't perform very well in her first task as PM. She repeated the same mistake in her second task as PM, she was not always respectful to her colleagues, and she was made invisible by the edit in most of the tasks. Perhaps this is why the majority prefer Raef to Helene and even SAS seems to agree that he made a mistake by firing Raef and that Raef could have probably made it to the finals.

IMHO selecting the final 4 was easy - at that stage - for SAS because he had already fired Raef.

He didn't want Lucinda, who, while very talented in certain areas, simply wasn't in the Amstrad mould, so he HAD to have Helene for a final 4.

SASs bigger mistake, which he has admitted, was not getting rid of Michael. That might have made it Michael, Helene, Lucinda going out in that order.

^^^I suspect that that is the case. I don't believe that he ever intended to fire three people after the interviews. I'm sure he always wanted four in the final. He could not have three, because they couldn't have had two teams if there were three finalists left, and three teams would not have been feasible. So he needed four in the final. He definitely did not want Lucinda (I'm sure he would have fired her the previous week if she had not been in the winning team), so that meant that he had to keep Helene.

Where this argument falls flat on its face is the relative strengths of the teams.

If he thought Helene was so useless then he was giving Alex a major handicap.

If he was prepared to give Alex such a handicap then why have him in the final in the fist place?

I'm sad to say that I think the arguement presented is yet another attempt by those who dislike Helene to spin things to try and discount the simple fact that Helene got to the top four of many thousands of applicants.

That really sticks in their craw but petty attempts to try and take that away from her are a little bit sad, especially at this juncture.

All of them managed to get onto the programme out of 25000 applicants, so they all must have impressed, as well as pressing the right demographic buttons. AND they made it through 2 selection interviews.

Having said that, which demographic button did Daffyd press??

Well now, let me see ...

Well, seeing as Sir Alan was picking the winning twosome, it was really irrelevant as to who was with who. If he wanted to hire Lee, it wouldn't have mattered whether Lee was teamed with Claire, Alex or Helene. He could have found a reason to fire the team which did not contain the one person who he wanted.

I have stated on a number of posts that I do not dislike Helene. I dislike some of her behaviour on the TA, but nobody's perfect - I'm far from it myself, and who knows how they themselves would react in that kind of situation. Do I think Helene deserved to get as far as she did No. That's my opinion and I'm entitled to it, just as much as you are entitled to believe that she did deserve to get as far as she did. It's a tv programme for goodness sake. It's meant to get people talking! I'm giving a view on what I think happened. I'm not saying that I'm definitely right. Unless you or I have an insight into the workings of SAS's mind, then neither of us can say with authority why Helene was there. We both have opinions. I haven't insulted yours (or suggested that you are lacking in intelligence because you disagree with me), so please don't insult mine, thanks.

However, lets not pretend that TA is anything like a real job interview. For a start, the interview stage would have been right at the beginning if that were the case. It's main aim is entertainment. Maybe that's why Michael was kept in for so long, despite lying and bribery...to get people talking. Who really knows?

I have also truthfully stated a number of times that I wish Helene, and indeed all of the candidates, the very best for the future. I do - I'm not in the habit of wishing ill-will on people.
Last edited by booklover : 17-06-2008 at 12:21

It seemed obvious to me that Helene gave her that task specifically to ensure that if they lost the task it would be Lucinda that would be blamed for it. Doing something 'interesting' as to put a technophobe in such a task rather than any other team member seems deliberate.

It was strange to see Raef just sit there, as well as Helene while Lucinda struggled with such an important job. (Yes it is debateable as to who has had training, but you would think common sense would prevail - One guy said his 12 year old could operate it). Don't you think there is a spare brain cell among 3 full grown people to work it out? The mind boggles.

Either way it looks like they wanted to ensure any blame was put upon her and therefore avoided working as a team. (This seems to be a running theme this year)

Oh, good grief, this old chestnut again.

How can anyone be so daft as to believe that someone will deliberately jeapordise the task just so that if they lose there is a possibility that they can shift the blame?

I mean, really, it's just too imbecilic for words!

If the PM wins the task their chances of getting fired are pretty much zero.

If they lose they stand an extremely good chance of being fired particularly if they have mismanaged their resources.

AS didn't harp on about Lucinda's performance or why she was there because the team won, but if they had lost I would imagine it's almost certain that Helene would have got the push for mismanagement.

To even suggest that someone would risk such a thing seems to indicate that the person doing the suggesting has, how shall I put this, an 'interesting' idea of business politics.

My Gran has a mobile phone that she can just about manage to make calls on - answering is a bit more tricky for her Should my Gran not have a phone for emergancies coz she doesn't know how to use the bells and whistles?

That's really one of the most ludicrous arguments I've seen on this issue.

The whole team sat there without helping Lucinda. The reason is in a program like the aprentice you can't leave your role and help your team mate without clear instructions from the PM. Otherwise, if it goes wrong, you will be fired. For example, SAS fired Shazia because she left her role to bring the irons. Jenny C didn't admit that she asked her to go and it looked from SAS's point of view that Shazia just abandoned her role.

Nick couldn't blame the others. However, he did point out that helene should have shuffled the team.

I thought Helene explained why she gave Lucinda that job on the YF programme. She said Lucinda did not want to do the sales pithch, she did not want to operate the camera so there was only one other job left and that was the one she gave her. Seems like Helene was in a no win situation where Lucinda was concerned.

Its not what people would do in business. The apprentice, because of the elimination process, it makes people want to work towards 'just surviving'. In the business world, I'm sure they would never behave like that.

Its the whole concept of the apprentice that makes people want to shift blame rather than work together as I'm sure most people would agree. Apart from you of course (preempting your disagreement at anything remotely anti-Helene).

Either way, they all (Raef, Lucina and Helene) seem to be completely computer illiterate if they couldn't figure it all out between 3 of them. I'm not defending my favourites to the death unlike some people.

I'm sure she does know how to use it (and I expect we saw her using mobile phones when she was project leader). I took her as saying she didn't know how to use its camera.

It occurred to me belatedly that what she says could be taken two ways. She may have meant she was uninterested in technology generally, or she may have meant she was uninterested in cameras. She says, "No, no, no, but I don't take photos. I've never had a digital camera. I don't know how to use the camera on my phone." This is all about photography.

So maybe Helene did not pick up that Lucinda was bad at technology generally. This may be why she denied being told that Lucinda was bad at it. She thought she'd only been told she was bad at photography.

(I'm just going by the transcripts here; I don't know how plausible it is. At the time, I thought what everyone else thought, that Lucinda was talking about technology generally. But maybe Helene misunderstood.)

You have that exactly back to front.

In the real business world people can make others look bad by inducing poor performance provided they are not too blatant about it because their actions will not be examined too closely at the time and they can get away with showing someone in a poor light so that at a future date they can point to under performance.

On TA, OTOH, if they, as PM, induce someone to perform badly there is a very good chance that they are the ones who will carry the can because the underperformance will be examined if that person is in line for the boot.

I find it hard to understand why this is not immediately apparant but there are a few who insist that PM's are prepared to risk the task and risk putting themselves squarely in the firing line on the off chance that their incompetant or Machiavellian behaviour will go unnoticed.


No, I quite agree, but they have to be an order of magnitude more subtle about it that you seem to believe.

Avoiding the sub tasks that are likely to lead to attributable failure or misdirection after the event are the tools of the blame shifter in TA.


It's not a matter of 'defending favourites to the death', it's a matter of point out that absurd suggestions are just that.

If you'd said that Helene was often miserable or behaved badly towards Lucinda then I would agree with you.

I will not agree that she or any of the other candidates would do anything so mind numbingly stupid as to set the team they are managing up to lose a task in the vague hope they can pin the blame elsewhere. That's just plain daft!

She did start by saying "I can't even use a mobile phone" but I can see your point. Everything thereafter was about taking pictures and it could be that she was saying was that she couldn't even take pictures using a mobile phone. We did come in part way. Yes, what you say makes a lot of sense.


If you'd said that Helene was often miserable then I would agree with you. I am still trying to find an example of Lucinda behaving badly towards Lucinda.

Does anybody want me to continue to transcribe this? I see another thread has already picked up the point that Helene did not take the training.

I was trying to be balanced.

In the photo task Lucinda and Helene got very snarky with each other. It was, for neither of them, their finest hour.


You could transcribe the argument but it's tedious work and I can't see you changing the mind of anyone who has a very fixed idea of who was to blame.

I just consider it a flare up in a very highly stressed situation. Perfectly understandable and forgivable (both candidates).

Technically you could say the behaved badly, though.