Daily Express

Ten things you never knew about...

- WILLIAM HARTSTON

It has been announced that the BBC children’s TV character Muffin The Mule is to celebrate his 70th birthday by appearing on his own YouTube channel.

1. Actually Muffin is 82. He was already said to be 12 years old when he first appeared in 1946.

2. Muffin The Mule was the first character created for children’s TV, appearing four years before Andy Pandy and six years before The Flowerpot Men.

3. The presenter who played the piano while Muffin danced on it was Annette Mills, who was the sister of actor Sir John Mills.

4. Horses have 64 chromosome­s, donkeys have 62, and mules and hinnies have 63.

5. Darwin saw the mule as an example of hybrid vigour. It is stronger and brighter than its parents.

6. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and female horse. A female donkey and male horse may have a hinny.

7. Mules are generally sterile but about 0.1 per cent of them can reproduce.

8. In the film Two Mules For Sister Sara, Clint Eastwood uses dynamite, which was not available until a year or two after the time the film is set in.

9. The earliest known use of the word mule to mean a drug courier was in 1922.

10. An animated version of Muffin The Mule was translated into Welsh in 2005 as Myffin y Mul.

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