Frank Herbert Muir was an English comedy writer, radio and television personality, and raconteur.
17 Facts About Frank Muir
2.
Frank Muir's writing and performing partnership with Denis Norden endured for most of their careers.
3.
Frank Muir's many writing credits include editorship of The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.
4.
Frank Muir was the second son of steam tug engineer Charles James Frank Muir, originally from New Zealand, and his wife Margaret, daughter of ship's carpenter Harry Harding.
5.
Frank Muir was born in the pub, and spent part of his childhood in Leyton, London.
6.
Charles Muir left his seafaring occupation after marrying, and took up unskilled work such as extending Ramsgate's railway and loading stores onto naval vessels; he finally took a job with a firm at Leyton, supervising their machinery, and died of pneumonia when Frank Muir was a schoolboy.
7.
Margaret Frank Muir ran a small sweet-shop across the road from the Derby Arms.
8.
Frank Muir left school prematurely aged fourteen and a half at his father's death, due to the necessity of earning an income to support the family.
9.
Frank Muir claimed that, when interviewed to join the RAF, he was "a weedy 6 feet 6 inches" but that he later "stabilised at a bent 6 feet 4 inches".
10.
Frank Muir joined the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of the Second World War and spent several years in the photographic technical school taking slow-motion film of parachute jumps on a project intended to decrease the frequency of parachutes failing.
11.
Frank Muir's work provided the manufacturers with the information they needed to improve both the equipment and the training, which was very effective in reducing the number of failures as well as the fatality and injury rate.
12.
Frank Muir was assigned to take pictures of the agents of the Special Operations Executive for identity documents at the training centre at RAF Ringway.
13.
In 1954 Frank Muir founded an amateur dramatic society, Thorpe Players, in the village of Thorpe, Surrey where he lived for many years.
14.
Frank Muir was a writer and presenter on many shows, including the 1960s satire programmes That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report.
15.
Frank Muir was well known to television audiences as a team captain on the long-running BBC2 series Call My Bluff.
16.
Frank Muir was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire CBE in the 1980 Birthday Honours.
17.
Frank Muir died in Thorpe, Surrey, on 2 January 1998 aged 77.