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. Other hosts: Siegfried Baboon and Rude Kid (2003-7), Octopus of Odstock (2008-9), The Man in Black (2010-17), Spade Cooley (2018-19), msc (2020-21), Grim Up North (2020-22), and Reptile (2020-23). Now the Committee of DI (2022), time (2024), and Banana (2023) oversee the biggest deadpool going...
ROCK HUDSON We at the DDP salute character development. Diana Rots carved out deadpooling notoriety in the mid-2010s by plucking their twenty from the previous year’s top teams – assembling a team through this manner is now seen in deadpooler’s parlance as “Diana Rotsing”. Their 2023 return tacked towards originality, and this shift in approach […]
THE HUNT IS OVER Spanish film auteur Carlos Saura has died aged 91. His upbringing in the throes of the Spanish Civil War influenced his filmmaking, as did the censorship of the Franco regime, which forced him to lean heavy on symbolism to get the themes of his films across. Among his best-regarded works were […]
BLAZEVIC ABLAZE Croatian footballer and manager Miroslav Blazevic has died a day before his 88th birthday. Recognisable by his white scarf good luck charm, he steered the Croatian national team to an impressive third place in the 1998 World Cup. The “coach of all coaches”, as his homeland called him, also had stints managing Switzerland, […]
NO LONGER STROUGALING What sounds like a pastry but is in fact a Czech Communist leader, Lubomir Strougal has died aged 98. Selected as Czechoslovakia’s prime minister in 1970, he was a classic political weather vane – initially wary of the Warsaw Pact crushing of dissent, he joined in for the ride when it was […]
FEBRUARY OFF WITH A BANG! What a country America is – where the sitting Vice President can shoot a guy and not even be the first example. Some 200 years after Aaron Burr shot Broadway star Alexander Hamilton, Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney went quail hunting with Texan lawyer Harry Whittington in early 2006. Cheney […]
MR. MONK AND THE FAILED KIDNEYS Buddhist monk Hsing Yun has died aged 95. An adherent of Humanistic Buddhism, he took a name literally meaning “nebula” to reflect his worldview. He founded the Fo Guang Shan order in 1967, which now has its tendrils all over the world. Politically he was known for his promotion […]
NO LONGER IN PEREL Born to a German-Jewish family, Solomon Perel and his family fled to Poland in 1935 as the rise of Nazism saw him expelled from school and his father’s store destroyed. Once the Nazis invaded Poland, Perel and his brother relocated once more to a children’s home in what is now Belarus. […]
DIALED BACK Actor Charles Kimbrough has died aged 86. He was best known as sturdy news anchor Jim Dial on Murphy Brown, a character in the Cronkite mould who served as a contrast to Candice Bergen’s spunky, Dan Quayle-baiting titular investigative reporter. He was also Tony nominated for Company and voiced gargoyle Victor in Disney’s […]
CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAPER Actress Melinda Dillon has been abducted from life aged 83. Her two best-known turns were as mums – first as the mother to a child abducted by aliens in Spielberg UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which earned her an Oscar nomination, and then as the mother to […]
JABOUILLE CROSSES THE FINISH LINE Racecar driver Jean-Pierre Jabouille has died aged 80. He was one of the earliest motorsport beneficiaries of Renault’s turbocharged vehicles, notching the first Formula 1 victory for the manufacturer in the 1979 French Grand Prix. He won the Austrian Grand Prix the next year, but a broken leg curtailed his […]
