All creatures great and small
Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick not only talks with the animals but makes them walk again, and his own story is just as compelling. Donal O’donoghue meets him
On the day I meet Noel Fitzpatrick aka Channel 4’s Supervet, he saves a swan from the tra c-choked streets of Dublin. e video of the rescue is posted online. We see Fitzpatrick shooing the discombobulated bird out of the path of a swerving car as the rain buckets down, before carrying his precious cargo to its canal-bank home. It’s an image of a man who acts on impulse, someone with a genuine life-long love of animals. But also in there is the TV star, a bit of a ham (his drama CV includes Heartbeat and e Bill) who makes Supervet entertainment and education, a dreamer and achiever who can also be “a right grumpy old badger.”
We meet some hours before ‘Swangate’. As he o en does, the 50-year-old looks knackered. At Fitzpatrick Referrals in rural Surrey he burns the candle at both ends, racking up surgery a er surgery, before sleeping on the
oor or going to his in-house gym. e previous week he was in the USA, delivering a lecture on ethics in veterinary science; now he’s in Ireland to talk about his memoir, Becoming the Supervet. “What did you think of it?” he asks. It is dark stu , raw and honest and perhaps easier to write than tell a journalist with a tape-recorder. Amid the occasional funny yarn (mistakenly wandering into Danny Devito’s Hollywood home; wearing Jim Davidson’s swimming trunks) is an account of merciless bullying at school, profound depression and failed relationships.
“I never feel good enough and I doubt that I ever will,” he says now of what he learned from writing his biography. “I always felt inadequate. Maybe some people might think that sounds trite when you’re aged 50 and at the top of your game. You should feel con dent every day but that’s not the case. I could go into my next operation and that could humble me. Writing the book taught me that everybody who has been through my life has given me something important that perhaps I didn’t see at the time, and it’s not just the animals. I hadn’t really listened to the humans so much. en I remembered all those people who had taught me something.”
Noel Fitzpatrick grew up on a farm in County Laois. In wintertime “you could write your name on the frosted windowpane” of the family cottage and Noel was up at all hours helping his late father, Sean, a respected cattle dealer and a tough taskmaster. His mother, Rita, who is still going strong, features as a loving person who wanted nothing but the best for her family. Yet Noel was a lonely child, bullied relentlessly at school. “Going into Bally n College I realised I was nothing and had no hope,” he says. “On my rst day in 1980, I just cried my heart out and when I went home I hugged my dog, Pirate, in the farm shed, I felt that nothing would ever come of my life.”
Yet it did and perhaps it’s those very demons that made Noel Fitzpatrick the global success that he is: a pioneering orthopaedic-neuro surgeon who employs over 250 people at his two hospitals in Surrey and Guildford. ‘ People don’t care what you know until they know that you care’, something he learned from his early days in farm animal practice in west Cork, is a line he still carries. Same as his other mantra, ‘Everything is impossible until it happens!’ de ning an optimist and idealist who dreams big. “I want to break down the barriers between human and animal medicine. at is a monumental challenge and probably won’t be achieved in my lifetime.”
Serious, driven and ambitious, Fitzpatrick is not without a sense of fun, sometimes at his own expense. “I nearly met Bono once,” says the man who is ‘a huge’ U2 fan. “I was in a restaurant in the south of France when he came into the bathroom and I got so nervous I peed on my own hand.” He laughs then, someone who admits that he has never been very good at relationships (the love of his life is his 11-year-old Norfolk Terrier, Keira, a er the actress Keira Knightley on whom he once had a crush) but who also writes of his desire to become a father. “I would like to think that is entirely possible,” he says now. “It’s not all about having a biological kid either; you can adopt of course.” He talks about his work with children via his roadshow Noel’s Ark and how he would “like to be that positive in uence for a kid of my own one day.” Before we part, Noel asks for a hug. I remember not to pat his back
(in his book, he writes how much he hates that). en he asks for a photograph and raises a clenched st, as if in victory or vindication. On the back burner a second book is already simmering, there are plans to build a third hospital beside the practices in Surrey and Guildford and he is intent on spreading his gospel of love and peace across the planet. “ is book is written for any child or adult who had a dream and thought they weren’t good enough to achieve it,” he says of his biography. I hope, amid all the hustle and bustle, he’ll nd a space for his own peace too.
When I saw Bono I got so nervous I peed on my own hand