Month:

Just over two days left to get your 2020 DDP teams in, but one person who won’t be entering 20 names is Tony Britton. Unless he sent a team in before dying, I haven’t checked. Anyway, Tony was a British sitcom actor with a lengthy resume in domestic sitcoms, often playing the patriarch figure. Don’t Wait […]

Heh. Rammed Ass. So the 250th DDP hit of the year was American spiritual guru and 60s counter-culture icon Ram Dass, who had announced earlier this year he was “ready to die”. Richard Alpert was an assistant clinical psychology professor at Harvard when he first met Timothy Leary, and the pair soon set about investigating […]

The boys of ’66 continue to deplete in number, with the Grim Reaper throwing up Martin Peters’ shirt number on the sideline. Ratty of face, Peters was a 22-year-old when he made his first World Cup appearance in England’s second game of the 66 tournament, part of Alf Ramsey’s shakeup after a lukewarm 0-0 opening […]

Kenny Lynch was one of the first black British entertainers to hit the mainstream, and one of the few people with a skintone darker than Des O’Connor on television in the 1960s. Born to a Barbadian Sfather and a Jamaican mother in Stepney, he was very much a traditional light entertainer. He sang, he danced, […]

From the “British Spunk And Times Obituaries” realm of DDPing comes Thomas Pearson who, until his death, was the oldest living British full general. He was always destined for that line of work: born into a military family, he attended Charterhouse and Sandhurst, where he was named a second lieutenant aged 20. His active service […]

Character actor Nicky Henson was first diagnosed with terminal cancer, which should have ended his career, in 2000. The son of musical hall comic Leslie Henson, Nicky first came to prominence as a potential leading man at the Young Vic in the early 1970s, handling both Shakespeare and Angry Young Man revivals with equal aplomb. […]

One of the greats of “actresses your girlfriend likes to use as desktop wallpaper but hasn’t seen any movies of” has died. Anna Karina was 79 and is survived by a lot of Tumblr gifs. She started her career in cabaret at the age of 14 and ran away from home to be involved in […]

The biggest DDP hit of the year came with the passing of the face of Emmerdale‘s “Attitude Era”, Leah Bracknell – and now we pay our respects to the face of its “Golden Era” Hulk Hogan. Sheila Mercier first started performing at a young age in concerts put on by her musician mother, and had […]

For a good two generations of British children, David Bellamy was their introduction to environmentalism. From Don’t Ask Me to Blooming Bellamy, along with endless appearances on the likes of Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Blue Peter, he was also a go-to voice for any impressionist appearing on kids’ TV (just gummy yourself up and say “gwapple me gwapenuts”). He also […]

“The Bald Eagle”, as Jim Smith was known to fans and rivals alike, was one of the most reassuring faces in football. As a player he had lengthy spells in the lower and non-leagues with the likes of Halifax and Boston, but it was as a manager that he’ll forever be remembered. He spent nearly […]