No Angels, the new Channel 4 drama about four nurses in Leeds, begins with an end: the demise of Mrs Caplin, a 70-year-old diabetic with chronic heart disease. "Not exactly one for Quincy, is it?" says one of those tending her deathbed with a matter-of-factness with which we will become familiar.
Probably not, except Mrs Caplin's death is not entirely straightforward. One of the nurses forgot to check on her when she should have: poor Mrs C is stone cold, her time having come some time ago. This could make things tricky with the doctor who needs to pronounce her dead, so they give Mrs Caplin a hot bath to warm her up and to disguise their forgetfulness. The doctor duly appears and makes the call, though it soon becomes apparent that they need not have worried. "Next time, dry her hair," the physician says, a cynic himself. There is no hand-wringing, no disciplinary procedures. Just a sneaky solution to a practical problem.
This is not an incident you're likely to see on the ultimately reassuring Casualty, despite its fondness for demonstrating the folly of mounting a shoogly ladder above a conservatory. Nor is it an incident that Beverly Malone of the Royal College of Nursing is likely to appreciate seeing on television. At a time when there is a crisis in nurses' recruitment and more than ever are abandoning the profession for less stressful jobs (clearing Cambodian minefields, for example), Malone has said No Angels is "a missed opportunity to tell the truth about nursing". She goes on: "Nurses' professionalism is misrepresented through the recycling of some urban myths. They may amuse, but they bear little relationship to how real-life nurses cope with the pressures and demands they face every day."
Well, she would say that, wouldn't she? The fact is, nurses get up to all sorts, including incidents like those depicted in the first few episodes of No Angels. They have sex in linen cupboards while on duty. They offer their pals "really good painkillers". They bitch about patients' relatives. They stay up all night, getting drunk and taking drugs, and then go to work for a day shift at 6am. And, yes, they gossip about male patients' members. With their friends. In the pub. If, like me, you're one of those friends in the pub, you will be familiar with such stories, full of technicolour description and gory detail.
That a professional behaves unprofessionally is hardly a hold-the-front-page revelation. World Productions, the makers of No Angels, have already brought us Cops, in which officers used dubious methods and even more dubious mood-altering substances. They were also responsible for This Life, a portrait of lawyers behaving badly. But it seems we want nurses to be different, better than the rest of us. Holier, in fact, than thou.
Even in the likes of Holby City and ER, where the staff have plenty of "issues", their problems tend to be personal rather than professional. Holby's nurses aren't close to cracking because of the intolerable demands of their jobs, but because they find themselves caught in (yet another) traumatic love triangle. Once, Casualty had a political edge. Now it has no sharp corners at all, nothing to have your eye out or prick your conscience.
Partly, this focus on the personal is because of the soapiness of such long-running dramas, but there's more to it than that. Having nurses behaving like regular people is a bit scary. Given their position as ministers to the sick and comforters of the dying, we want them to be removed from us. Because of our terror of sickness and death, we'd rather not have the poorly in the hands of people like us: individuals as fallible, as screwed-up as we are. Believing in the unadulterated saintliness of nurses is akin to believing in fairytales, in knights in shining armour with speedy steeds. We have unrealistic expectations about nurses because we need the reassurance.
Regardless of what Beverly Malone says, nurses play hard because they work hard. Really, relentlessly, thanklessly hard. That they will talk so frankly in the pub with their mates suggests that there isn't much of a mechanism for them to release the pressure at work, few opportunities to vent spleen or expunge stress - other than to go out and get totally wasted or, after years of blood, shite and tears, quit the profession altogether.
It does no one any favours to polish nurses' halos without acknowledging that the job is as much about wiping arses as saving lives. Nurses do things we'd rather not. They do things because we'd rather not. It is ridiculous turning them into saints more at home on stained-glass windows than in hospitals. In recent years, we've learned - often the hard way - that doctors aren't gods.
Of course nurses do wonderful jobs, but they're not superheroes. To deify them is to do them a disservice. In No Angels, the heroines are flawed, honestly and wonderfully. And that, actually, is strangely reassuring.
· Gareth McLean is the Guardian's TV editor
