Helen Skelton has competed in Strictly during a very difficult time in her private life and although her confidence is growing week by week her body language is still showing signs of some raw emotions behind the overkill smiles.
On It Takes Two Helen finally started to open up about her recent problems and the more positive non-verbal signals she used as she spoke suggested that she’s fighting to take control of her life back right now.
There are still traces of a less confident woman but they come in between signals of bravado and even a touch of rebellion.
Her trait of leaning forward in her seat and self-diminishing (in this show she doubled up so much she was playing with the ankle strap on her shoe at one point) gives the impression that she still wants to hide almost as much as she did in the beginning, where she said she was walking off towards the exit door in rehearsals.
Her smile is back after the tearful outburst on her VT last weekend, where she had to stop talking and hide her face as the crying started, but it is often a lightning smile that seems to appear as a gesture of politeness and because she is called on to smile in her job, and it dropped away quickly more than once as she was listening to the others talking in It Takes Two.
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In contrast to that though, Helen seems much stronger and able to face her problems and talk about them.
Earlier in the series she was shooting Gorka stares of disapproval as he spoke about her lack of confidence but now she seems to have come partly to grips with her emotions and even adopted a new air of honesty.
When Janette asked if she enjoyed the Samba, Helen made an obvious call in her head to skip the usual cliché of ‘I loved it’ and explain how she had found it difficult.
She even threw in some signs of healthy rebellion and fight-back, as though some anger might be bubbling up inside, when she said ‘I’m not here to be the world’s best Samba dancer’.
Janette seemed prepped to ask the difficult question that Helen has avoided so far, telling Helen it had been ‘an emotional few months in your life’.
This time Helen looked keen to open up and talk about her problems and her feelings and even reference her marriage, as there was no pause and her answer sounded prepared.
‘Strictly makes you ask questions of yourself you don’t want to ask’ she said. Helen’s gesture of counting off on her fingers made her look much more decisive and in charge as she spoke.
When she described her own life: ‘I’m a 39 year old woman with three kids’ she began to throw her hands in the air to describe the key aspects of her life, moving from one side to another to make them look compartmentalized: ‘Your job, your relationship, your house, your career and all of that’ was possibly the first reference to her marriage.
Her conclusion sounded sad and heartfelt: ‘You don’t find joy in yourself’.
Hopefully Strictly has given Helen that joy in herself. She seems to have support from Gorka who looks determined to not push her beyond her enjoyment level and who clapped her encouragingly as she finished her small speech.
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