Helen

> They love me! They really love me!
>
> Helen, "The Sound of Helen"

**Helen** is a supporting character in the series *Kiff*. She is Kiff and Barry's drama teacher at Table Town Middle School.

## Profile

Helen is a witch who works as a drama teacher at Table Town Middle School, where her students include Kiff Chatterley, Barry Buns, and their friends. She is at least 400 years old, as revealed in "Personal Assistant". Helen has a sister, Agnes, who owns the dry cleaning store Wish Wash.

## Appearance

Helen is a tall and slender witch with light green skin, pointy ears, yellow eyes, and light turquoise hair. For clothing, she wears a black dress, a brown belt with a yellow buckle, black boots, and a black witch hat.

## Personality

Helen is extremely self-absorbed in nature and frequently antagonizes others with her rude and dismissive attitude. Her negative reputation around Table Town is such that she has been consistently rejected for the Table Town Humanitarian of the Year award due to having "never done a single kind thing for anyone", though Helen rejects this characterization as "political".

Helen's inflated sense of self sometimes leads her to manipulate others for her own ends, best exemplified when she uses Kiff's hypnotized friends to do things for her in "Mall Leader", and when she alters Kiff's career test result to make Kiff her personal assistant in "Personal Assistant". She is also shown to be careless with regard to interacting with others, bizarrely not recognizing Beryl or Kiff whatsoever despite already knowing them in "Weekly Grocery Shop".

As a teacher, Helen is prone to belittling her students and sleeping on the job. She has ambitions of one day quitting teaching and making it in the entertainment industry. Helen is particularly fond of musical theater and has written several musicals centered around herself, posters for which are displayed around her classroom. In "The Sound of Helen", she manages to blackmail Principal Secretary into greenlighting one of these projects, *The Sound of Helen*, though she quits directing the musical when her class criticizes the quality of her script.

Helen is a highly skilled dancer, and her talents enable Principal Secretary to win a dance-off on behalf of Table Town Middle School in "Principal Dance Socks". She nearly won the position of third alternate on the TV show *Dancing on the Tables*, only to lose the spot to Principal Swan due to a cryptic "incident".

Being a witch, Helen has the capability of using magic. This can variously prove to be a hindrance or benefit to Kiff and Barry, as Helen's usage of a computer goblin results in Barry being sent to high school in "Big Barry on Campus" but is helpful in apprehending the titular antagonists of "The Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse", for instance.

## Relationships

### Kiff Chatterley and Barry Buns

Helen has frequently been involved in Kiff and Barry's adventures, with her selfishness often putting herself at odds with the duo. Nonetheless, she has also at times provided assistance to them, typically in the form of performing spells for them, and the two are willing to maintain a cordial relationship with Helen despite their frequent conflicts.

In her debut appearance in "Pool Party", Helen casts a spell at Kiff's request to help Barry swim, in exchange for an introduction with Roy Fox. When Kiff tries to warn Helen that Roy plans on making fun of her on one of his TV shows, Helen dismisses Kiff as jealous, then undoes the spell when Kiff sabotages her shoot with Roy. Kiff and Barry are nevertheless happy to have done the right thing for Helen, with Barry noting that he senses a "sadness" within her. When Helen realizes Kiff was right, she musters up enough humility to thank Kiff.

In "The Sound of Helen", Helen's drive to achieve her musical theater dreams inspires Kiff to conceive the idea for the musical *My Fair Helen*. When Helen eventually watches her class present *My Fair Helen*, she is touched and tells Kiff that she has "never felt so close to an employee before".

### Agnes

While Helen and Agnes love each other, they have a difficult relationship due to their completely opposing personalities. In "Farley", Helen takes Barry to get Kristophe's stuffed doll Farley dry cleaned at Wish Wash. When Barry learns that Helen and Agnes are feuding, he offers to counsel them, resulting in a tearful reconciliation between the sisters. By the end of the episode, however, they end up in another disagreement, this time over who loves the other more.

In "I Like to Move It!", Helen is unwilling to visit Agnes' home to claim a free piano because they are once again feuding, so she hires Kiff and Barry to pick up the piano in exchange for a magical wish-granting horseshoe. Later, Helen mentions that the horseshoe has never been used because she and Agnes could never agree on what to wish for.

### Principal Secretary

In "Principal Dance Socks", Helen provides magical socks for Principal Secretary to wear which allow her to control his legs during his dance-off with Principal Swan, but after winning the dance-off, he remains oblivious to her assistance and incenses her by failing to give her credit for his victory. While they patch things up, another misunderstanding prompts Helen to sabotage his performance on *Dancing on the Tables*, though they later unite to perform a song on the program with Kiff and her classmates.

In "The Sound of Helen", Helen blackmails Principal Secretary into funding the production of her musical *The Sound of Helen* in exchange for changing his flat tire, which she is later revealed to have caused in the first place.

When Principal Secretary's habit of viewing old photos of his ex is revealed in "Ghost Wolf's Art", Helen is able to relate and tells him that she placed GPS trackers on all of her exes. Principal Secretary thanks Helen for making him feel less pathetic.

## Foreign voice actors

* Amparo Bravo (Castilian Spanish)
* Ana Cloe (European Portuguese)
* Berenice Vega (Latin Spanish)
* Carla Abrahamsen (Swedish)
* Cinzia De Carolis (Italian)
* Ditte Jaspers (Dutch)
* Helena Hanson-Dytrtová (Czech)
* Katrine Falkenberg (Danish)
* Klementyna Umer (Polish)
* Maíra Góes (Brazilian Portuguese)
* Marie-Laure Dougnac (French)
* Olimpia Mălai (Romanian)
* Raili Raitala (Finnish)
* Sarah MacDonald Berge (Norwegian)
* Szilvia Réti (Hungarian)
* Tami Barak (תמי ברק) (Hebrew)
* Yang Shih-ying (楊詩穎) (Taiwanese Mandarin)
* Zeynep Önen (Turkish)

## Trivia

* Helen's on-screen appearances are typically soundtracked by her own distinctive theme music.
* She is managed in her entertainment career by her own mother, as shown in "The Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse".
* Her great-great-great-grandmother helped curse the Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse into toy form many years before the events of "The Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse", and still maintains a ghostly presence in the current day.
* She has a framed picture of herself and Centaur Claus in her living room. When she meets Centaur Claus in "Halfway There Day", they are blatantly flirty with each other, which is noticed by Kiff and Barry.
* She owns a part-time bedazzling business called Be Dazzled!, as shown in "Mall Leader".