Short answers, pulled from the story.
Michael Henry Flanders was an English actor, broadcaster, writer, and performer of comic songs, born on the 1st of March 1922 in Hampstead, London. He is best known for his stage partnership with composer Donald Swann in the two-man revues At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat, which ran from 1956 to 1967.
Flanders contracted poliomyelitis in 1943 while serving at sea with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He spent the following three years in hospitals and was discharged in 1946, remaining dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
At the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden, At the Drop of a Hat ran for 808 performances, from the 24th of January 1957 to the 2nd of May 1959. The show then played 215 performances on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, opening on the 8th of October 1959.
Flanders and Swann began writing songs together in the summer of 1948, producing material for West End revues produced by Laurier Lister, including Oranges and Lemons, Penny Plain in 1951, and Airs on a Shoestring in 1953. They had first collaborated as pupils at Westminster School on a school revue called Go To It in 1940.
Flanders was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1964 New Year's Honours. His text for the children's cantata Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, with music by Joseph Horovitz, won an Ivor Novello Award in 1976, the year after his death.
Flanders died suddenly on the 14th of April 1975, aged 53, of a ruptured intracranial berry aneurysm while on holiday at Betws-y-Coed in Wales. His ashes were scattered in the grounds of Chiswick House in west London.