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Angels with dirty faces

The Royal College of Nursing says Channel 4's new hospital drama No Angels misrepresents the profession. Not so, the show's creators tell Gerard Gilbert

Monday 16 February 2004 01:00 GMT
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I knew a nurse in Liverpool in the early Eighties. She had a wonderfully filthy laugh and I remember her once attempting to rip my clothes off on a nightclub dancefloor. That may have had something to do with the bottle of amyl nitrate passing between our group.

The point is, the tanked-up nurse letting off steam in a riotous manner is almost a cultural stereotype. The reason for such behaviour is just as widely appreciated - it's the only sane reaction to being surrounded all day and all night (on one of the shorter shifts) by injury, sickness and death. It's one of those immutable rules of life - nurses know how to let off steam. The only people who don't seem to share that view are those at the Royal College of Nursing.

The RCN, the nurses' professional body, has been in the newspapers recently, reacting badly to a new 10-part Channel 4 drama series, No Angels. The programme follows four young nurses in Leeds at work, rest (which barely happens) and play. It depicts them, according to The Sunday Times, as "sex-mad ladettes who sleep with doctors and take drugs". Yes, children, they take drugs.

Beverley Malone, general secretary of the RCN, is quoted in the paper as saying: "Nurses' professionalism is misrepresented through the recycling of some urban myths. These may amuse, but they bear little relationship to how real-life nurses cope with the pressures and demands they face every day."

The makers of No Angels would obviously beg to differ. It is the latest TV drama from World Productions, the company founded and run by Tony Garnett, veteran producer of such socially realistic masterpieces as Kes and Cathy Come Home, whose more recent credits include Cops, This Life, Cardiac Arrest and Between the Lines.

"World Productions has a tradition of showing how institutions really work," says the creator and chief writer of No Angels, Toby Whithouse. "No Angels is vastly different in tone from the likes of Cops and Between the Lines, but there is a similarity in that not many dramas have shown the medical profession in such an unsentimental light."

The essentials of a Garnett production are certainly all there, particularly the unflinching look at an institution that television has sanitised. In the past, such treatment has been afforded to the police (in Cops and Between the Lines), the legal profession (This Life) and the NHS (Cardiac Arrest). An indelible streak of Sixties anti-establishmentarianism runs through Garnett, surviving his metamorphosis from BBC dramaturg to fully fledged independent.

Garnett's productions are often also about young people - music to the ears of the youth-obsessed Channel 4 executives. This Life rang a clanging bell with an entire generation of young, urban professionals in the mid-Nineties. Attachments, Garnett's BBC 2 saga of dot.com folk, may have seemed laughably opportunistic but always carried an addictive jag of zeitgeist.

Above all, his trademark is his ability to combine serious issues and popular drama without showing the stitch marks. That he also produced Ballykissangel shows that not all he touches has to be "relevant".

The tone of No Angels is surprising from such a company as World Productions - it's jaunty, at times almost in the style of Hollyoaks, all washed down with a rousing, dancing-round-the-handbags soundtrack of soul classics. It nicely reflects the attitude of the nurses, although this might not wash with those who like pure grit with their social realism. Whithouse himself describes it as "comedy drama", and this might have something to do with No Angels' origins, which weren't specifically as a medical drama at all.

"Initially I wanted to do a show about a gang of women," says executive producer Simon Heath. "There are quite a few male gang shows on telly, and I'd just done one called Men Only. The whole world of nursing seemed a good arena [in which] to explore women because it's still the most recognisably female profession."

Men Only, you may or may not recall, told of the laddish escapades of a bunch of south London male friends - an increasingly dark story in which the chums' camaraderie spirals out of control in vortex of lap-dancing, coke-sniffing and pornography. It eventually ends with the gang rape of - ironically enough - a nurse.

No Angels isn't anywhere near as sinister, although the first episode begins with a patient dying after the nurses fail to check on her. To cover up their mistake they immerse the woman in a hot bath to warm up the body and make her death seem more recent. In the same episode, a teenage girl dies in the toilets after being accidentally discharged, an obnoxious junior medic has his drink spiked with a tranquilliser by one of nurses (she had told him it was ecstasy), and another does a "Boris Becker", having sex with a doctor in a cupboard.

"There isn't a single event in the whole series that isn't inspired by something one of our advisers told us," says Whitmore. These "advisers" were panels of nurses informally drafted in to speak of their experiences, all overseen by a senior nurse with 15 years' experience.

"We took some nurses out for a drink and chatted generally about things like pay and conditions," continues Whitmore, "but as the evening wore on the other anecdotes came out, including the one about the dead patient being warmed up in the bath. A doctor tells them at the end of the scene that next time they should dry her more thoroughly. We quoted it absolutely verbatim."

Another source of storylines was the endless stream of directives issued by NHS Trusts to their staff. "They're so bureaucratic that we've got enough of these for another four or five series," says Whitmore. One such document from a Dorset hospital inspired a segment in the first episode in which the nurses are told to stuff a thin plastic sheet beneath their uniform to stop doctors being distracted by their visible panty-lines.

Indeed, there is a surprising element to the hospital life shown in No Angels - just how old-fashioned it appears. Things don't seem to have moved on much since the days when Leslie Phillips prowled the wards with his stethoscope and Barbara Windsor distracted doctors by bending over to change the bedpan.

"The sexual politics in the workplace are old-fashioned," says Whitmore. "Initially I was resistant to this element of the series, but all our research bore out that emancipation hasn't actually made it into hospitals. Doctors are presumed to have all the technical knowledge while the nurses are responsible for patient care. One thing we found intriguing was that when these four modern young women go back into hospital they step back in time."

In the first episode, a doctor blames a nurse for his mistake in discharging the teenager who subsequently dies in the toilets. In fact, the fictional wards of St Margaret's seem awash with mistakes. "Things go wrong in every profession," says Whitmore, "and in pre-watershed dramas you want to be reassured that nothing ever goes terribly wrong." Simon Heath, the executive producer of No Angels, adds: "The hospital is an institution, and like any institution it has its rules, which are often absurd. It makes you realise that the people trying to reform the NHS have a huge task on their hands. The way doctors and consultants work is archaic, and the nurses just get on with it. They don't sit down and theorise about it. Then they go and let off steam, whether that be in the form of sex, drugs or friendships."

Ah, yes, sex and drugs - always a recipe for controversy when shown on television, although not nearly as much as in the past.

"Television drama often tends to take a moral stance," says Heath, "and that is something that is not reflected in society. Society doesn't have the moral hang-ups that television has. We're quite lucky that there are no post-watershed medical shows - the watershed defines what areas programmes like Casualty and Holby City can deal with. But if you talk to nurses, the world that they occupy is very post-watershed.

"We try to show that the job creates the lifestyle - if you are dealing with shit and sick and death on long shifts for four solid days and nights, the only sane thing to do is to go out and get drunk, and even more."

According to the Royal College of Nursing, the timing of No Angels is unfortunate. The college is currently supporting a campaign being run by Nursing Standard magazine called "Nursing the Future", which is trying to rebrand the profession and promote a "truer" picture of what goes on in hospitals. The organisation has also just launched a new campaign, "Speaking Up", to encourage nurses to promote their profession and be more assertive about their skills. "No Angels is a missed opportunity to tell people the truth about nursing," Beverly Malone of the RCN told the press last week.

"That is something I take issue with," responds Toby Whitehouse. "I think this would be a wonderful recruitment advert for nursing. Are they saying Holby City and Casualty are good for recruitment? Those shows serve a purpose but are not fair representations of what the nurses' lot is like. After watching them, people might think that nursing is a nice, clean job full of handsome doctors. We do a better job of showing the reality of nursing. People will be able to enter the profession with their eyes wide open."

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