Death happens. Why not make it interesting?
The online competition to guess which famous people won't make it to the end of the current year. If they're elderly, ill, or just live a high-risk lifestyle, stick 'em in your team, and for each one whose death you correctly predict, you'll score points. DDP was dreamt up in Derby, England (hence the name...) by Big Iain back in 1996, then was run from 2003 to 2007 by Siegfried Baboon and Rude Kid From 2008 to 2009, it was run by Octopus of Odstock , and from 2010 to 2017 by The Man In Black. From 2018 to 2019, Spade Cooley was host. Now in 2020, it's the turn of trio msc, Grim and Reptile to oversee the biggest deadpool going...
Horse-racing journalist, failed bookmaker and perhaps England’s greatest living misogynist, John McCririck, has fallen. From his reputation as a professional rent-a-gob, it may be hard to believe that McCririck was originally a highly respected writer – Harrow-educated, he revolutionised the way track data was broadcast to the BBC in the 1970s and was even named […]
Leon Kossoff was one of the “School of London” painters that shunned the art trends of the mid-20th century and instead took their inspiration from the Old Masters. While he never achieved the fame of some of his contemporaries (Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud), Kossoff had a lengthy and respected career and was still holding exhibitions […]
Arte Johnson didn’t start acting until his mid-20s, and didn’t make any serious headway on TV for another decade. Perhaps his most notable role to a UK audience before his major breakthrough was as Samantha’s mute cousin Edgar in a first series episode of Bewitched. However, he broke through fully in 1968 with a regular role […]
Thanks to his unusual name (he was the son of Italian immigrants), Lee Iacocca had a lengthy legacy as a “funny namedrop” for American comedians. But he achieved so away from those five syllables, and has a claim to be the greatest American CEO of all-time. Starting with Ford as an entry-level engineer after World […]
Beth Chapman (nee Barrmore) was the fifth person to marry Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman, and the woman who had the fortune of being his wife while he managed to keep a vague cap on his substance abuse issues and got himself a TV deal. She was with him while he successfully tracked down […]
We heard him knockin’ so we let him in… Dave Bartholomew amassed over 4,000 songwriting credits over his 100 years on Earth, being a key figure in rhythm ‘n’ blues’ transformation into rock ‘n roll. A New Orleans native, he brought the city’s jazz and brass beats to the opening years of rock ‘n’ roll, […]
Born in Hungary but educated in Switzerland, George Rosenkranz was one of a number of promising Jewish scientists who were helped in escaping from the shadow of Axis Germany by Nobel Prize winner Leopold Ruzicka. Rosenkranz was traveling to a new post in Ecuador when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and thus had to settle for […]
As always, it’s the smaller deaths that make the biggest impact on the DDP… Helen Legh had been a fixture on BBC Three Counties Radio for over a decade, progressing from the early breakfast slot for a Milton Keynes audience to helming the Sunday morning show across the whole region. That was until a big […]
Gloria Vanderbilt’s father, Reginald Vanderbilt, was a degenerate gambler and alcoholic. That’s bad. He died when she was just 18 months old, from liver cirrhosis. That’s also bad. However, because he was fantastically wealthy – even with all the money frittered on fast women and slow horses – he was able to leave her $2.5 […]
Maria Giuseppa Robucci was the oldest person in Europe at the time of her death, having been born a month before Atletico Madrid were formed as a football club. She lived her entire life in the small Italian town of Poggio Imperiale, where she worked on a farm (she was still able to chop wood […]
