Listening to the Animals: Becoming The Supervet by Noel Fitzpatrick

Author:Noel Fitzpatrick [Fitzpatrick, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Swan and My ‘Son’

Life Imitating Art

‘How dare you have an actor pretending to be a vet on a wildlife programme and killing a swan,’ read one of the letters of complaint from an angry television viewer.

On 2 April 2005, I had in fact been a vet pretending to be an actor on BBC 1, in the TV hospital drama Casualty. The following night I was a vet, actually being a vet, and pretending nothing on Channel 5, in a programme called Wildlife SOS, where I had to put a swan to sleep. On the BBC drama I had said ‘safe journey’ to my ‘son’ as he was dying, and on Channel 5, back in real life on the wildlife programme, I said something similar as the swan slipped away, and a few dozen innocent viewers thought I was an actor masquerading as a vet. One can’t really blame the viewers for a little confusion: art and life really were imitating each other.

Perhaps I got the role on Casualty because I was the only actor in the audition who could pronounce ‘subacute sclerosing panencephalitis’. In the episode, I was helping my son to die by overdosing with drugs, and Imogen Stubbs, who played my on-screen wife was, unlike me, a very talented actress and brilliant at crying at exactly the right moment. I wasn’t. However, I did invent the word ‘povickimise’ which means to cry false tears – since I had to rub Vicks ointment in my eyes to do so.

When I settled in Guildford in Surrey, I’d not only moved with the dream of expanding my veterinary knowledge, helping more animals and ultimately specialising. I’d also harboured a secret dream. It wasn’t the kind of thing one vocalised in Ireland in the eighties: I wanted to go to drama school. I couldn’t get that affinity with literature and poetry I’d felt since secondary school out of my head, nor did I want to. I yearned for the chance to explore what great writing, films and theatre meant in the real world and why they transported me to another level of awareness, insight and perception. I wanted to understand how the emotional connection between page and performance actually worked and why it really mattered in the world, in my world.

To this day, I think it’s unlikely that I would have come up with inventions or solutions to surgical problems if I thought purely in scientific terms. I have felt more alive when listening to music, or watching a play or a film, and I have found scientists more interesting when they painted pictures and did not draw in straight lines. I think that most scientists who have great insights have an artistic bent. I think that, even back then, I also knew instinctively that if I wanted to make a difference to animals on a global level then I was going to need to understand how words worked, and especially spoken language in the media.

Towards the end of 1993, I was spaying a small dog at the Underwood and Croxson practice in Tongham, Hampshire.

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