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Professor Noel Fitzpatrick’s work as a veterinary surgeon has been chronicled in 15 TV series of Channel 4’s Supervet. His clients have included Meghan Markle’s dog Guy and Russell Brand's cat Morrissey but Noel most definitely doesn’t see himself as a vet to the (pets of the) stars. He runs his own animal orthopaedic and neuro-surgical facility and is Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Surrey. This is what we learned from his Desert Island Discs:

1. Noel believes that doctors and vets should work together more closely

Noel argues strongly that the fields of human and animal medicine would benefit from working more in partnership. “It's better as a model,” says Noel, “to study naturally occurring disease in dogs and cats and humans at the same time, as you will have to do with Coronavirus. And as, in my opinion, you should do with cancer, rather than injecting it into an animal and then studying the effects.”

2. Before Supervet, Noel portrayed a dodgy greyhound dealer on TV

Five years after qualifying as a vet, Noel headed to drama school and trained as an actor: “Einstein - one of the greatest scientists of all time - said you cannot feel the meaning of life by trying to rationalise it in the mind. You can only feel it,” says Noel. “I went to drama school because I had studied so hard for many years and I realised that science was just a blink. Just our rationalisation at that moment in time, but art transcends all of that.” Noel worked as an actor on a number of TV dramas, with roles including a ‘shady crow poisoner’ on Heartbeat, and a seller of ‘gammy racing dogs’ on The Bill.

3. Noel’s closest childhood friend was a dog called Pirate

“He was an animal on the farm and he was there for a functional reason and to me he was my best friend.” Noel was being bullied at school, often quite brutally, but knowing Pirate was there made a huge difference. “Well, I talked to him about it… Who are you going to tell that to? [I’d say] ‘Today I'm afraid, Pirate. I can't sleep tonight, Pirate’ and I owe him so, so much.”

4. Noel wanted a guitar as a child – but his father preferred to focus on the farm

Noel was born in Ballyfin in Laois, Ireland, one of six children. His father Sean was a farmer.
“Daddy never considered farming [to be] work. Anything that diverged from that was anathema to him. I remember when I was ten I asked him for a guitar. And he gave me a saw to saw the horns off a bullock! Because that's how we rolled back then,” say Noel, laughing.

“I remember he only ever actually gave me one material thing in my whole life - I will remember it forever. It was my birthday. And he walked in with a box with a Timex watch in it. He gave it to me and he said: ‘Just use your time wisely.’”

5. He first heard one of his musical choices on a broken radio he fixed himself

“It’s 1971 and I had no radio but I found one on the scrapheap,” explains Noel. “I made an aerial out of a coat hanger and stuck it in the radio. It was an old Sony radio. And this sound came from a radio station called Radio Luxembourg… like angels with mellifluous words from heaven. And it was Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. It was Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and John Paul Jones - people I'd never heard of. And in all of its glorious eight minutes, I would just lie on my back and dream that that stairway to heaven existed and that one day I would walk on it, and it would bring me to a place of love.”

6. His early work as a vet in rural Ireland proved to be a vital education

“This ability to be in the moment with the cow, the sheep, the horse, the pig, the dog, the cat - whatever the animal may be - and interpret the clinical signs without the need for an MRI scan, a CT scan all that stuff that that Supervet fella puts on television,” says Noel laughing. “I mean, my goodness, can you not just take out a thermometer and do the decent thing?”

As well as empathy with the animals Noel also learned to improvise. After constructing a rudimentary splint for a farm dog’s broken leg using old wire and some felt, he and the farmer Larry were looking at the dog, now able to make its way around the farmyard and Larry said: ‘There you go now. Sure everything's impossible until it happens…’. Noel describes it as “one of the greatest lessons of my life.”

7. He’s learned how to overcome nerves before taking on a big operation

Noel says he no longer gets nervous as he heads into the operating theatre, “because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it. I recently had to operate on my own dog, Keira, and I was probably more nervous than I've been for 20 years.”

“But it isn't so much nerves as knowing that I could fail and accepting that that's part of the journey and as long as the family's on that journey with you, and you've discussed the ethics with them, then I don't think nerves really help. Once you blow the doors of the theatre, usually with your foot and you walk in somehow, any mist you may have had evaporates and somehow it's a magical thing. You pick up the scalpel blade and you become the person who's gonna save the world.”