No Angels

Having watched the first episode expecting something fresh and original, I can hopefully do some good for the world and advise others to avoid this trash. Not only does it offend with it's "expose" on the nursing profession, it also manages to offer up a bunch of female characters with not one personality between them. Watching a four-headed monster-ladette show off with it's "we're so funny, we're so clever, look at us, aren't we naughty" fake empowerment of women...

I can only think that the creators of this show we're aiming for a "Sex In The City" type show. Instead, they have set television standards back by about twenty years. Not only did it fail to distinguish it's female leads from each other, there was hardly any story, anything interesting going on, nor were the characters appealing in any way. You can watch any Ibiza documentary if you want to see drunk women hitting on drunk men - Channel 4 what were you thinking? And I've not even gone into how awful the acting is...

This took the slot of 'Shameless'. 'Shameless' was so good it got an immediate re-run and is currently scheduled straight after this. 'Shameless' was and is excellent. This is sh*t. Channel 4 have been shameless in commisioning this utter crap. The characterisation is non-existent and therefore it is impossible to give a damn about what is going on. This is what happens when a 'bright' young exec. says "I know.....lets do 'Teachers' crossed with 'Sex in the City' crossed with 'The Girlie Show' and give it a jaunty motown soundtrack...oh and plenty of shagging!". Avoid.

This show IS British TV at it's finest!! It's just a shame that it was highly underrated!! Although the characters have qualities that we've all seen before in sitcoms and soaps...these four women are SO easy to relate to and sympathise with!! The characters ARE believable as 'real' people...everyone knows at least one of these women even if they don't work in a hospital! The plot lines are solid from the very first episode and leave you wanting to know what is going to happen next. However, if you think 'No Angels' is a TV show that is based on a complete hour of sex and shallow puns with a bit of medical work here and there, well then you are sadly mistaken as the episodes are laid with a foundation of actual issues which make it the amazing show it still is. It ended too soon.

Its not set in London (or Manchester). Its based on the premise that nurses and doctors are not god like creatures. Lots of sex and very un PC. I mean nurses smoking cigarettes drinking to excess and having casual sex! Florence Nightingale this isn't.

If you have a traditional in your view of hospitals as genteel places, where silent beautiful nurses glide from bed to bed caring for ill grateful patents with a stoic handsome Dr on call 24 hours a day, then you will hate this. The nurses have lives outside the hospital! The patents are sick with visible illnesses! The staff are under resourced and under pressure! It deals with death, sex, incompetence and relationships. Its is enjoyable and well worth a look and because it isn't prime time it doesn't have the "pre watershed" censor that Casualty/Holby City do so it can be that bit more realistic.

These are real characters and after two series the actresses have got them to a T. They are incredibly real and you can see what motivates them to continue in a massively rewarding and then unrewarding vocation.

Apparently all the scenes are based on real life incidents. Obviously compressed into hour long episodes but never the less they are in the main realistic. Third series? A new main character perhaps but it would be very welcome.

'No Angels' is what passes for cutting edge modern TV drama - if you have little sense of taste. A supposedly hard-hitting portrait of the lives of young nurses, it achieves a portrayal that is never more than shallow, with lashings of sex compensating for the innate thinness of the drama. A heavy soundtrack of irrelevant (female) soul music makes a desperate claim to the attention of young hip (but brain-dead) women who would seem to be the target audience. Even the jokes about the sheer horror of life on the ward, and the black humour which enables the staff to cope, are neither funny nor truly sickening, just tasteless in a schoolboy-funny sort of way.

I recently re-watched Dennis Potter's classic 'The Singing Detective'. One of Potter's deliberate aims was to parody the hospital soap - but he also exceeded it, producing a vision that was true, grotesque, sexy (at least where Joanne Whalley was involved) and hilarious. Of course that work was a masterpiece on many levels. But 'No Angels', with its simple formula, aims low and misses. Sadly dull.