WHY I WALKED OUT OF HARRY AND MEGHAN’S WEDDING
TV’s Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick reveals why he left the royal nuptials to soak his feet in a bidet! By Cole Moreton
Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick has seen a lot of people weep for the creatures they love. ‘I’ve had billionaires and megastars and people who are not famous and homeless people all lie on my floor and cry,’ says the famous animal doctor, star of his own Channel 4 show. ‘Prince or pauper, it’s a universal truth that they are always naked in front of their dog or their cat.’
This dark and brooding 52-yearold from Ballyfin, Co Laois means that we drop all pretence and become our most natural selves with our animals, whoever we are. And Fitzpatrick should know, having had countless famous clients, from DJ Chris Evans to Meghan Markle, and their cats, dogs and rabbits at his state-of-the-art clinic in Surrey. He got an invitation to the royal wedding, although as he explains, this single-minded man left early. ‘I had on a pair of tight, really fancy new shoes and they were hurting my feet.’
The orthopaedic neuro veterinary surgeon is as famous for his pioneering operations as he is for being on the telly, having made the
Guinness Book Of Records for giving a cat called Oscar the world’s first bionic feline feet, but it’s the heart that concerns in these difficult times.
‘I am reflecting on how important it is for humans and the animals we care about to look after each other right now. Coronavirus has heightened our awareness of families. My cat and my dog are integral family members to me and I don’t think anybody has a right to judge from outside about that. It is a very deeply personal thing,’ says Fitzpatrick, who is single but lives with a cat called Ricochet and a border terrier called Kiera.
‘I feel very strongly that the bond I see between a human and a companion animal makes humans very kind and shows the best of humanity. The crisis of the animal coming into my clinic allows a window to the soul in the human that you wouldn’t normally see.’
Fitzpatrick explores this in a new podcast series called Animal
People, during revealing conversations with mates and former clients including the Queen legend Brian May, Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri and the magician Dynamo. These are far more than fluffy chats: May talks movingly about a difficult relationship with his dad, while Fitzpatrick in turn reveals how the music of Queen helped him survive the loneliness of life as a bullied teenager on the farm in Ireland, with only a collie called Pirate as a friend.
‘My commitment to people is that if they let me in, I will never tell them a lie. Ever. I will never sell out.’
As we walk together by the river near his home in Guildford, it becomes clear that philosophy runs much deeper for an intense man who considers himself to be on a mission: to help humans understand our deep connection with the animals around us and to get veterinary and medical science to work together for the greater good.
‘I do the media stuff because I would like to build a platform to change the way medicine is done and show that we are not alone on the planet. I don’t give a flying f*** about fame —except that it helps get the message across.’
Fitzpatrick runs a staff of 250 and a team of 30 surgeons at his clinic and will take in any animal that needs it, regardless of who the owner is. Costs range from €230 for an initial consultation to €8,700 for a canine hip replacement. But there’s no doubt his work brings him close to some very prominent people, including royalty: Meghan Markle brought her beagle Guy to him after it broke two legs shortly after her engagement to Prince Harry was announced. A relationship clearly developed, but isn’t that a bit odd? How does a vet get invited to a wedding?
‘I put an endoprosthesis into a dog’s leg for cancer recently and I got invited to that person’s wedding, too. He was a fireman. The dog was carrying the ring up the aisle,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘I believe in the beauty of the human soul. I believe we all come from God’s pure consciousness and I try to relate to people at their most real and I guess that’s the answer to why I get asked to things.’
He works long days and nights in the surgery, often sleeps there or writes academic papers into the early hours of the morning, so most invitations get turned down. And even when he went to Windsor Castle for the wedding of the century, he didn’t stay to the end. ‘It was an amazing honour to be there and quite surreal because I was sitting just behind Elton John. After the service, there was a big get-together. Prince Charles gave a few words and Elton played a bit on piano and it was all very nice. There were canapés. It was a mag
‘I see the bond between human and animal’
‘I thought “what is a farmer’s son doing here?”’
nificent occasion and also incredibly humbling. I was thinking: ‘What is a farmer’s son doing here? What am I doing here?’ I was feeling imposter syndrome. I felt truly honoured, but anyway, I decided I would leave.’
What was wrong?
‘I thought, I don’t actually know anybody. I’m really lucky to have seen this magical thing and I am very happy for Harry and Meghan, because they are wonderful people, but my shoes are killing me. I also thought this is all a bit overwhelming. So I asked a lady if she could show me the door out of the castle.’
They weren’t expecting guests to leave early and it turned into a bit of a farce. After walking out of the castle gate and through the tight ring of security, Fitzpatrick realised he was lost.
‘Suddenly I’m on the wrong side of the castle, in a penguin suit. I don’t have a mobile with me, because we weren’t allowed to carry them. I don’t know where I am. The American tourists can’t help. The security guards aren’t allowed to show me a map. I wander around for two hours with my jacket over my arm and in my socks, because I’ve taken my shoes off. I know I’m staying in a house by a church but it turns out there are seven churches in Windsor! Finally I ask in a shop that mends keys and they recognise my description of the place. So I get there at last and with all of the celebrations going on outside, Noel Fitzpatrick is sitting with his sore feet in salted water in a bidet. So that was my royal wedding: my feet in a bidet.’ He laughs, before wincing and putting a hand up to his neck. An accident at home a month ago has put him in a neck brace and nearly cost his life.
‘I fell down a flight of stairs and crumpled headfirst into a wall, my body crushing my neck.’ Suddenly the round-the-clock lifestyle of the Supervet has been brought to a shuddering halt. ‘People say you should stop and smell the roses. I never really understood that phrase until now, but if you’re sitting there in hospital with two blocks on either side of your head to keep it in place and you physically can’t move, and the man in the bed next to you is dying, and the lady in the bed on the other side of the room is screaming in pain, you are forced to stop and smell the roses.’
Having to be absolutely still has been a challenge for this ceaseless worker. ‘I am a farmer’s son: I should be out getting in the sheep and bringing in the hay.’
Fitzpatrick grew up on the farm in Laois. Obsessed with comic superheroes, he invented a character called VetMan, who was going to save animals, partly by giving the wounded ones bionic legs.
And Fitzpatrick made that dream come true as an adult by training as a vet in Dublin and America then moving to England to create a life modelled on the movie hero Iron Man.
‘I knew I needed to do three things simultaneously. I needed to build VetMan’s bunker because otherwise he couldn’t save all the animals in the world.’ That’s his clinic in Surrey. ‘I needed to get academically qualified enough to power the machine,’ says Fitzpatrick, who admits in his podcast that he got into television out of frustration after writing 100 academic papers and realising nobody was listening. ‘I needed to build a television antenna that could transfer messages into the world.’
Fitzpatrick kicked off his media career as an actor, appearing in episodes of Heartbeat, Casualty and The Bill, but it was a famous client who gave him his breakthrough.
‘Chris Evans came in with his dog Enzo. He is a dear friend and a beautiful human being. We would sit and talk in the garden outside the practice. He went to the controller of BBC1 and said: “What about this guy?”’
The Bionic Vet series in 2010 starred Oscar the cat, who was ultimately given feline versions of the blades the runner Oscar Pistorius used. Viewers were touched by stories about animals like Ice the puppy who had been trampled by a horse, Lottie the cat with a shattered pelvis and Sandy the labrador who had an implant grafted onto her leg so she could have a replacement for her deformed paw. The Supervet series began on Channel 4 in 2014 and over 100 episodes made Fitzpatrick very famous. ‘I was at a concert and somebody was tak