cult film freak: FIONA FULLERTON, ERIN GERAGHTY & JULIE DAWN COLE IN 'ANGELS'

Fiona Fullerton in ANGELS Year: 1975-1976 First Season Rating: ****1/2

The 1975 British/BBC television series ANGELS is a character-driven story centering on two pairs of student nurses wherein Fiona Fullerton and Erin Geraghty are new to the in-house hospital training program while Clare Clifford and Julie Dawn Cole have been working in the ward for a year... so neither duo are actual nurses quite yet, and each pairing are polar opposites that are individually cast-billed depending on who the episode centers on primarily...

As the pilot mainly introduces Fiona Fullerton and Erin Garaghty as Patricia and Maureen: the first being progressive, spontaneous, confident, experienced, entitled, proudly egotistical and insanely beautiful while the other's an Irish farm-girl so shy she can hardly lift her head from a curtain of stringy hair... allowing former ADVENTURES OF ALICE IN WONDERLAND star Fullerton to help the Catholic-raised Garaghty be more assertive (either at work or at play) while forced to learn (mostly through head instructor Faith Brook) that she herself doesn't know everything...

Julie Dawn Cole and Clare Clifford in ANGELS

Then there's iconic WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY spoiled girl Julie Dawn Cole playing against type as an optimistic, hard-working nurse that every patient trusts while stern and uptight, spectacle-wearing manager Clare Clifford seems like a young Nurse Ratched...

One needs to become more professional while the other has to shed her narrowed over-professionalism: each episode banking off various problems either within the strict instruction classrooms or the busy, unpredictable hospital ward (where everyone eventually winds up)...

Fiona Fullerton and Erin Geraghty in ANGELS

And, with a rocking opening theme song tougher than any 1970's cop show, the hospital setting... while meaning everything in medical dramas to come... is merely a backdrop for what's one of the greatest character-studies into young women forced to stick together against the odds, and sometimes despite themselves...

Brilliantly enveloped in a binge series before there was such a thing as ANGELS (featuring Lesley Dunlop, Karan David, Marsha Miller Debbie Ash and Janina Faye) only borders on the soap operatic template the series would wind up becoming after that classic first season cast (lasting two more seasons) were gone, but never surpassed or forgotten.