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The Drop 40 is back in business baby, and beloved American entertainment figures from the Johnson administration are gonna pay! Fast on the heels of Doris Day laying down for some final pillow talk, comedian and actor Tim Conway has been court-martialed from McHale’s Navy. Conway was a radio DJ who was discovered Rose Marie […]

When we were just a little dead pool, we asked Doris Day, when will she die? Will it be 2004? Will it be 2005? Will she ever be the second Drop 40 hit of the year at an embarrassingly late date? Yep, the wide-eyed girl-next-door, Hollywood legend and friend of closeted gay actors everywhere, Doris […]

Brian Walden’s first love was chess, but was discouraged (read: physically beaten) out of pursuing it as a career by his working class, Irish Catholic mother. So he turned to his second love, politics, while studying at Oxford. He was a vocal supporter of then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and even wrote some of the […]

Freddie Starr’s father was an alcoholic bare-knuckle boxer, who broke both his son’s legs on at least one occasion. As a result, the young star was put into care homes for a while, where he developed a taste for showbiz. He appeared as a child actor in films like Violent Playground with David Macallum before forming […]

One of the “to do” tasks in the DDP in-tray is going through some of the facts and figures and pulling out any interesting statistics. A kind of “OptaDeath”, if you will. However, I’m 99% sure we can say that Sprent Dabwido is the first ever DDP hit from the nation of Nauru. A former […]

In 2019, lindy-hopping may have a reputation of an artform solely for vintage dressing-wearing white people who can sit through more than 25 seconds of Postmodern Jukebox without vomiting, but it was originally an authentic, vital African-American artform. And its last living great performer, up until congestive heart failure saw her off a few days […]

Another name that took its time coming through with a qualifying obituary was David McNee. McNee was the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police throughout that famously law-abiding, copper-respecting period of 1977 to 1982. A brief runthrough of the highlights of his five-year reign: The Iranian Embassy siege, which he was in charge of operations against […]

With the deaths slowing down slightly after a hectic few weeks, obituary desks are taking the opportunity to clear their Evernote “to do” lists. Among those to get a tardy pass for their tardy passing is the cricketer Alan Moss. Moss was a right-arm fast-medium bowler who opened the order for Middlesex in the 1950s […]

Peter Mayhew was working as a hospital porter in Croydon when an article about the town’s largest residents was spotted by a Hollywood producer. And while the film in question (Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger) is lost to history, it got him a role in a slightly more significant work: Star Wars. Mayhew’s […]

Jamaica-born but Manchester-raised, Oliver Harrison’s in-ring boxing career wasn’t much to write home about (6-4-0 as a super-lightweight), but he had significantly more impact as a trainer. His highest profile charge was Amir Khan, and he took the Bradford-born Olympian from a fresh-faced Olympic graduate to an 18-0-0 WBO intercontinental champion. The pair’s working relationship […]