Professor Roy Meadow drama wows West End

A sparkling new play based on the life and times of the renowned paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow has opened in the West End to rave reviews. Written by the flamboyant young playwright Art Grant, a part-time GP and former student of Sir Roy at St James University Hospital, Leeds, The Importance of Being Learned is a witty, thought-provoking bio-drama based around key episodes in the formative years and illustrious career of the much-loved scientist and court entertainer who gave the world Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy.

Act One opens in Form 1A of Stonyface Grammar School, Wigan, 1944 with the eleven-year-old Roy nervously waiting his turn to recite his chosen piece in front of the class and desperate to make a good show. A succession of gawky young boys have failed to impress either their classmates or the gruff form master Mr Warmpit with their dirge-like mumblings.

"That's enough!" Mr Warmpit cut short the latest embarrassing effort. "Meadow!" he called out. "Now for god's sake boy, put some life into it!"

Roy stumbled to the front and stood shaking, facing the rows of bored and fidgety young nippers discreetly etching their place in history on the desktop or folding their paper planes, longing for break and a chance to fly them.

"Come on lad, we've not got all day!"

The embryonic expert in maternal psychopathy wiped a dangling thread of glistening snot from his nostril. "One one is one," he piped up suddenly with surprising vigour. A wave of attentiveness swept through the classroom. Pen knives were swiftly repocketed, arms were folded neatly on desks. This was something worth hearing at last.

"Two ones are two," Master Meadow continued, emboldened, finding his natural rhythm. Mr Warmpit settled back in satisfaction as his new star pupil pressed on, ever more confident, ever more sure of his facts, into his six, his seven, his eight times table, further than any new entrant had ever got at Stonyface before. Surely he would stumble in the notorious elevens?

But he swept through them without a hiccup and onto the climax. "Eleven twelves are a hundred and thirty-two. Twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four," the precocious youngster joyfully concluded to a chorus of cheers and a volley of paper aeroplanes that the strict disciplinarian Warmpit was for once only too happy to indulge.

Yet even in that moment of triumph who could have foreseen the glorious arithmetical trajectory that the academic career of the gifted Lancashire lad would follow over the next thirty-five years? It was barely eight months later as the family gathered around the wireless to hear Mr Churchill announce the long-awaited end of European hostilities that Roy grabbed the limelight in the dramatic style that would become his trademark, jumping in front of the cabinet and switching the Prime Minister off in his prime.

"Guess what I'm doing in school tomorrow," he announced. "My thirteen times table!"

This was too much. Dad sprung from his chair like greased lightning, copped hold of the impudent young whippersnapper and bent him over his knee for a ceremonial thrashing. "Thou'll not be bringin' shame on this house!" he cried. "There be twelve times tables and twelve is what thou's to learn, and not to go lookin' beyond 'em. Never, d'ye hear!"

"It don't bear thinkin' about!" mam emphatically agreed. Proudly deferential and steeped in their old-fashioned ways, Mr and Mrs Meadow had but a dim awareness of the revolutionary intellectual movement quietly gathering momentum in the sleepy cloisters of Oxford University and challenging those age-old assumptions about the ineffable times tables — that there were twelve of them, comprising a complete and self-contained set, and that they had all been discovered in a musty tomb in Alexandria long, long ago.

The dour Northern couple would have been shocked indeed to learn that their talented son not only thought about it but did it, and that his numerical exploits had come to the ears of the leader of that group of radical thinkers Professor Ezekiel Sconce, with whom the boy was now in secret correspondence. Only three days earlier at High Table the controversial Professor of Pure Mathematical Humbug had postulated the existence of a hitherto unsuspected thirteen times table, possibly somewhere in Mesopotamia, and declining the after-dinner port, had rushed back to his rooms to compose a feverish letter to his youngest and favourite protégé telling him all about it.

Yet even Sconce had underestimated the boy's true potential. Despite his tender years and sore bottom it was Meadow who continued to push back the boundaries of the possible, striding deep into uncharted territory and leaving his tutor far behind in the unceasing quest for bigger and better axioms of multiplication to pronounce out loud, long before he had even arrived at Brasenose College amid the dreaming spires of academia to commence his undergraduate degree.

If an elusive thirteen times table had at last been rooted out, reasoned young Roy, then might there not even be another one out there? And why shouldn't he be the one to discover it?

Within a fortnight he had not only proved the existence of the fourteen times table but learned it, and recited it at morning assembly to a standing ovation, a joyous occasion that spurred him on to even greater achievements. His appetite for times tables was insatiable, and whenever he found a new one he made sure to learn it, poring over his exercise books far into the night, lips moving silently, until he was indisputably the most learned pupil north of the Trent and itching for pastures new, a grander, more challenging stage on which to multiply.

In another radical departure, for which society will be ever grateful, culminating as it did some thirty years later in a series of life-saving interventions on behalf of endangered children, Roy became deeply involved at Oxford in the nascent science of probability theory. That's the intriguing theory that you can turn a number inside out, even a really big one like some of the stupendous products of Roy's own celebrated multiplications, by introducing a "reversive agent", if only you can work out what it is. Once again it was Meadow who made the critical breakthrough, applying the full force of his explosive intelligence to the problem night after night, trying one thing after another and rubbing it out until he had fully formulated the fundamental principle of "one-inness". It was the key that would open up the immense (yet paradoxically tiny) possibilites of this exciting new field.

We see him now at the first elucidation of his new-found principle, to a panel of awestruck dons in the oral examination that secured him his double first. "It's absolutely essential to say 'one in' before you say the number itself," the exceptional candidate explains, as if instructing his would-be disciples.

The examiners' mouths hang open, stunned by the elegant simplicity of the solution. Roy presses home the point: "Don't leave it till after the number or you get into a terrible muddle and your calculation goes all up the spout," he warns them.

Even three years later the by now much diminished but still loyal Professor Sconce, supervisor of Meadow's PhD thesis entitled More and More Amazing Multiplications still has difficulty taking it in.

"It's quite simple, Zeke, you go like this," Roy reminds his flagging mentor for the umpteenth time in a spellbinding scene on the banks of the Isis in 1963. "One in a hundred thousand, one in a million. Before you know it, Zeke, you're into the most fantastically miniscule possibilities it's truly mind-blowing!"

It is the mid nineteen-seventies now and the start of Act Two. By now a distinguished professor, Roy Meadow has not been idle in the interim, consistently challenging orthodox assumptions with a single-minded determination that has brought him recognition as the undisputed world authority on advanced arithmetical recitation, together with numerous honours, tributes and clusters of letters after his name, testimony to both the quantity and accuracy of his invaluable times tables, published bi-monthly in The Arithmetical Review and other leading journals. It is only the invention of the electronic calculator that has put paid to their distribution as a practical tool to every classroom in the land.

Perhaps it is this disappointment that makes the highly decorated professor pace up and down in his study as if questioning the value of his inestimable work. In a moment of apparent decision he bangs his fist into his hand and turns face-on to the audience to deliver a heart-felt monologue, expressing a new-found desire to apply his prodigious learning to a more practical end, a deep-seated need to exercise his undoubted genius for the wider benefit of humanity.

While waiting for the call, which was not answered for several more years, Professor Meadow took some much-needed time off to travel North and enjoy the family life that he had long denied himself, becoming intimately acquainted with a number of mothers and children through a series of inspections that would become the model for best practice in Cleveland a decade later.

At last an opportunity arrived in the shape of a vacant chair in paediatrics at St James University Hospital, Leeds in 1980. It came not a moment too soon. For decades a curse had gripped the nation, bringing tragedy to dozens of homes every year. Yet despite recent advances in medical diagnosis the experts remained baffled, at a loss to explain how a healthy infant could be placed in its cot in the evening breathing soundly, and fall asleep never to wake up again.

Sifting through reams of case studies in a bid to unravel the mystery, one particular statistic caught the attention of Meadow's eagle eye. "Well, well, well," he chuckled to himself as he spotted it. "I think this will do, yes this will certainly do."

The figure that Sir Roy had alighted on, known to paediatricians as the "one in eight five four four" rule, represented the actual chance of any particular family being rocked by a cot death tragedy. In other words, this was the likelihood that one of their babies would die inexplicably in the cot without anyone having lifted a finger against it.

But the relentless seeker after truth could not simply accept this statistic at face value. It would have to be verified, and he at once set about conducting a series of rigorous tests, bringing all his scientific training to bear on the evidence, subjecting it to intense scrutiny night after night, poring over his notebooks until the figures swam before his eyes. Rule "1 in 8544" proved extraordinarily resilient, surviving his every attempt to knock it down. It was a remarkable paradox that such a widespread scourge, when looked at from the point of view of an individual family, was precisely one of those really quite small possibilities that had been the bread and butter of his studies for years. Who better than he to investigate further and finally pierce through the shrouds of compassionate but half-baked theorising and maternal self-deception that surrrounded this sad phenomenon?

And if it was very unlikely to happen to just one child in a family, mused the irrepressible Professor of Paediatrics in a legendary leap of imagination that became known as Meadow's Leap, then heaven only knew the odds on it happening to two of them. But if only heaven knew then it was about time that the most learned professor in Britain made it his business to find out. Despite the litany of academic achievements already under his belt it was Meadow's indefatigable research into this little understood aspect of infant mortality, and its enormously important practical results, that marked the truly golden period of his career, for which he will be most fondly remembered.

Not that he rushed into publication over his early successes in the field. For years the dramatic night-time rescues in Leeds and surrounding districts went largely unreported. Publicity was of much less concern to the selfless public servant with the impeccable scientific pedigree and razor-sharp mind than the size of his fee. But local reporters sensed that something was up. Rumours were rife. The passionately numerate child saviour, who could diagnose a mother's pathological condition by multiplication alone without needing to know anything about her, would not be able to dodge public adulation forever, and the second act closes with the sensational trial of Mrs Angela Cannings, at which Professor Sir Roy, called as an expert witness, was destined to steal the show.

Next week

The Cannings trial and after. The story of one man's fight for scientific integrity, justice and truth — Part 2.

Previously

• Iraqi child mortality rates probably due to Cot Death Syndrome
• Surgeons cast doubt on recapitation claim
• Head-swap doc reprimanded by GMC