'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.
