Hero worship: Meet Supervet Noel FItzpatrick ahead of his one-man show in the 3Arena

Noel Fitzpatrick takes to the stage at the 3Arena tonight for his one-man show. Fresh from the audience of his debut UK show, Suzanne Harrington is a newly converted Supervet super-fan

HULL, Yorkshire, on a dark Thursday evening, and the streets are empty. That’s because everyone and their mother is packed into the local arena — capacity 3,500 — to see the opening night of Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick’s road show, ‘Welcome To My World’. Two hours later, the professor, who likes to call himself a ‘leprechaun’, gets a standing ovation, and there’s not a dry eye from all the hopeless dog lovers in the house. #MeToo.

In the lobby, you can buy a Supervet hoodie for £50, kid-sized, black veterinary scrubs for £40, t-shirts with Professor Fitzpatrick’s brooding face emblazoned on them for £25, and mugs, bandanas, and beanies for £15. The tour takes in arenas around the UK, with a show in Dublin this evening at the 3Arena, where tickets start at €51.20. He has a book out on October 18, entitled Listening To The Animals: How I Became The Supervet. (Yet, he’s famously not in it for the money — everything gets ploughed back into the practice and the research. He employs 250 people.)

His story makes up the first hour of the show, which is handy, because I arrive in Hull knowing just three things about the Supervet: he is a vet, he is Irish, and he is on the telly. I take my tabula rasa into an arena crammed with diehard fans, who hang on his every word, and watch, with increasing fascination, as he tells, with illustrated backdrops and music, of his journey from a bullied farm boy from Ballyfin, Laois, to national treasure, who puts prosthetic limbs on bunny rabbits, grows new feet on dogs from bone taken from their tails, and pioneers 3D hip and shoulder replacements for our furry domestic friends. He is, quite simply, bionic: Visionary, restless, ultra-focused, ultra-driven.

Two weeks to go until publication day... !#ListeningToTheAnimals pic.twitter.com/pIoUYHnm4G

— Noel Fitzpatrick (@ProfNoelFitz) October 4, 2018

Professor Fitzpatrick’s practice specialises in orthopaedic and neurosurgical medicine for small- to medium-sized creatures; he’s a pioneer of bone-anchored prostheses, stem-cell-seeded bone implants to generate new bone tissue, and 3D-printed joint replacements; he also has an oncology practice.

At his surgery, there are no cages, just glass walls; the animals he treats do not have ‘owners’, but ‘family’. He hugs everyone, humans and animals alike, and speaks openly of the devastation of not being able to save an animal. He mostly means dogs. Oddly, his devotion is species-specific: he is not vegetarian. (Of all the things I discover about Professor Fitzpatrick, this is the most striking cognitive dissonance: an animal lover who eats animals?)

He has no work-life balance, does not share his private life with another human — his companion is a border terrier, named Keira, after actor, Keira Knightly — and does not take holidays or weekends off. He consults in the morning at his Surrey headquarters — his ‘field of dreams’ — and operates in the afternoon and evening until midnight, unless there’s an emergency, in which case it might be all night. He speaks with passion and sincerity of hope and love, and how the love of animals makes us all better humans. He often sleeps at his practice, and his main passion, apart from medicine, is rock music. He says that lying in a field at the Reading festival, listening to loud music, is his therapy, his escape, or “going mental at a rock concert for two hours”. (He has a t-shirt that reads ‘Pets and Hugs and Rock’n’Roll’).

Dressed like Bono — he is a diehard U2 fan — tonight, he performs a carefully crafted monologue, detailing the pivotal animal moments of his life: not being able to save a newborn lamb on his dad’s farm, aged 11, and the resultant feelings of despair; how the farm dog, Pirate, was his only friend as a child; how a small boy in West Cork asked about the afterlife of his injured pet rabbit (the punchline is Dunmanway, which goes over Hull’s head, apart from a lone snort of laughter from my seat); and the dog who saved him from a knife-wielding mugger the night Fitzpatrick arrived in Philadelphia, as a wide-eyed country boy.

He takes us inside his head as a lonely, sensitive child — how he invented a superhero called Vetman to save both the animals and himself from the school bullies; how he swotted like mad at his hated secondary school and was offered university places for both human and veterinary medicine, the latter which he studied at UCD. Then, inspired by Rocky, he got a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania, in Rocky’s home town of Philadelphia, before going back to Ireland to do farm veterinary work. He was further inspired to move to London, when a cow crapped on his head.

His friend, the late actor Philip Gilbert, used to tell him that “Everything is impossible, until it happens”. He longed to build his own practice, which took years of struggle. He opened it in Surrey in 2005, in debt for millions. His vision was enormous. It worked: it’s the same practice we see in his Channel 4 series, Supervet. He has treated the beloved dogs of everyone from Russell Brand to Meghan Markle; treatment can cost thousands, tens of thousands.

Was working away at the practice tonight when one of my team found an owl lying by the side of the road. I got out there and thankfully he hadn’t broken anything. He had been stunned by hitting a car. After a bit of TLC and coaxing he shook his head and flew away safely x pic.twitter.com/QGmsfBPVeW

— Noel Fitzpatrick (@ProfNoelFitz) October 3, 2018

He does his best to accommodate people with less money, but so cutting-edge is his work that he cannot do it on the cheap. He doesn’t care when people say that it’s just a cat, or just a rabbit, or just a dog. He sees the bigger picture, which is pioneering medicine for all creatures, animals and humans. The second half of the show is where Professor Fitzpatrick delivers his message.

Having charmed with his whimsical, often poignant backstory — with lots of footage of mangled dogs (and a few cats, but tonight it’s all about the dogs), whom he has bionically reconstructed, inspired by the Terminator movie — he shares his vision.

THAT vision is that human and animal medicine should be developed side by side, not separately, as they have been for the past several hundred years. His charity, Humanimal, is all about the simultaneous advancement of human and animal medical treatment. He says he used to write lots of scientific papers, but nobody, apart from other vets, read them, because they were boring; he is a strong advocate of using entertainment to educate and inspire. Hence the roadshow, the telly series, the book. Taking us on a virtual tour of operating theatres — he is a big fan of theatres, having worked briefly as an actor — he tells us how prosthetic limbs for animals are ten years more advanced than for humans; he says that animals have been used to advance human medicine without ever benefitting from it, and wants to change this.

He wants both strands to become more interwoven, so that everyone benefits.

He ends the show with the news that next year, the Royal College of Surgeons will trial a technique on humans which he pioneered on animals. This crossover, which appears to be his core passion, is greeted with rapturous applause by the dog lovers of Hull. He brings his dog, Keira, on stage at the end, hugging her in his arms.

I think of my own beloved German Shepherd at home — Ruby, my constant companion — and get a bit choked up. You can’t help it. We are all riding the Supervet wave.

Yet, Professor Fitzpatrick is keen to remain humble, to remind us that he is not the dog messiah (despite founding what can only be described as canine Glastonbury, DogFest). Speaking in his local, Surrey paper, he has said: “People need to realise that I don’t have the solutions to all problems, I’m just a leprechaun trying to do his best.”

Whatever. He’s won me over. I’m already thinking about next summer’s DogFest. What could be more fun than thousands of happy dogs in a field?

Notice - Supervet Saturday 6th Oct Doors 6.30pm - Show starts at 8PM SHARP. Please allow enough time for travel and getting through security. pic.twitter.com/06jn0db2IH

— 3Arena (@3ArenaDublin) October 5, 2018