DDP 2025: POPE DAVID VI
That’s a wrap on 2025. What a year it’s been. The US had a never-ending stream of fuckwittery from their newly-elected right winger government, and the UK… oh, too easy. Pope Francis died and we got an American Pope, while the DDP’s Papal Palace goes back to the regular Pope stomping grounds of Italy.
Francis gave his blessing to the competition
Yes, I’m reusing gags from the last time Spade won. If you don’t like it, you won’t have DI to kick around anymore at any rate!
Before we tackle the DDP, here’s a rundown of who left us in the final weeks:
Raul Malo as Mavericks frontman had a big 90s hit with “Dance the Night Away”, Sophie Kinsella was a regular on the bestsellers list with her Shopaholic romcom books, Arthur Cohn produced Oscar-winning fare such as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Eddie Thornton trumpeted for Georgie Fame and in “Got to Get You into My Life”, Anthony Geary was the Luke of the Luke and Laura soaps supercouple in General Hospital, Gil Gerard starred in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Peter Arnett won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Vietnam War, Norman Podhoretz was a leading paleo-neoconservative, May Britt acted alongside Marlon Brando and Peter Falk before marrying Sammy Davis Jr, SPOTY rescued AC Milan footballer Lorenzo Buffon and another name we’ll get to shortly, Hamas militant Abu Obaida was killed in August but only brought to our attention recently, Ike Schab was one of the final survivors of Pearl Harbor, James Ransone and Isiah Whitlock Jr. continue the string of The Wire deaths, Brazilian beauty queen Ieda Maria Vargas was a former Miss Universe, Cecilia Gimenez unwittingly birthed one of the great early 2010s memes when her botched restoration of a Jesus fresco made him look like a monkey, Carmen de Lavallade was a Kennedy Center Honoree dancer, Jacqueline de Ribes was a regular of the Internation Best Dressed List, and ex Bangladeshi PM Khaleda Zia was Bengali for “Superstar Billy Graham”.
Stanley Baxter was one of the biggest stars of yesteryear British TV with campy sketches that often played on his knack for impressions, such as the “Parliamo Glasgow” routines that lampooned Scots regional dialects and his Queen Elizabeth-in-all-but-name character the Duchess of Brendagh. His career largely winded down by the 90s and he finishes as the year’s final Sulu.
While not as quite on target as George Michael, Eartha Kitt, or Dean Martin, Chris Rea continues an ongoing tradition of a singer with a big Christmas hit dying around the holidays. Beyond the driving home, he was an everpresent on the UK charts with songs including “The Road to Hell” and “Auberge”, and a legend in deadpooling for lasting a quarter century after a brush with the dreaded pan can. On the other side of the pond he was mainly known for “Fool If You Think It’s Over”. Well, it is.
The shock value this month went up to 11 with Rob Reiner. Son of comedy pioneer Carl, Reiner first made his mark as lefty son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic on All in the Family, a frequent target of Archie Bunker’s insults and raspberries. He ultimately outdid his old man with a filmmaking career that began birthing the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap, and acclaim across multiple genres including Stand By Me, Misery, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. Alas “all in the family” ended up too on the nose with the stabbing death of him and his wife at the hands of his son.
The last A-list expiry of the year comes in the double-barreled shape of Brigitte Bardot. Her breakout role in And God Created Woman made her a premier sex symbol of her era and she enjoyed a singing career alongside her film stardom. She retired from entertainment in the 70s but remained in the public eye through her animal rights activism and dubious comments about Islam. Her death brings us down to three surviving individuals namechecked in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Chubby Checker, Bob Dylan, and Bernie Goetz) and leaves one shouting BARDOT, DEADPOOL PEST in their best Billy Joel impression given what would’ve been massive popularity had she lived several more days.
And God created a massive headache for deadpoolers… those were the daaaaays!
The gauntlet was thrown in the first week of the year with hospice sitting ducks folkie nonce Peter Yarrow and cowboy wrestler Black Bart. For many months, the one to beat was Reptile’s The Love Boat who managed multiple unique and cult hits that fended off eschewing more mainstream lingerers like James Whale or Patrick Murray, and the dissident Kim Seong Min appeared to be his coupe de grace (and a counterweight to Shiu Ka Chun’s failure to obit, which ultimately was Reptile’s undoing). But the final stretch came with more twists than a Chubby Checker’s Greatest Hits album; a level of excitement only seen elsewhere on the titillating pages of Getty Images. First up came Faster Than A Dead Horse, a more casual team who previously peaked at 23rd, who took the lead with Sophie Kinsella. Kinsella was crucial for Spade, who placed him in a position where if boxer Greg Haugen, who died back in February without a whiff of UK press, managed a QO, he’d win. The BBC Sports Personality of the Year award is something of a DDPer secret weapon, as they publish in late December a list on the BBC each year of sports personalities who died this past year. This usually salvages a couple of names from the List of the Lost each year (ever since Tom Belso got a shout in 2020), and Haugen was the other SPOTY QO foreshadowed earlier in this write up. If less comprehensive a victory than his 2022 one, it was still a fine blitz for six in a trademark December comeback for Spade, fittingly about a decade after his 2015 Sadhana Christmas smash-and-grab.
The Theme Team League was won by sport team A Question of Sprouts, which had the same amount of points as Irish outfit The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn but one more hit to their name. Rookie of the year was Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Slaughter reaching joint 13th. Makes a bloke feel so proud…
If Francis was the headliner death, some pop culture powerhouses left too amidst the record-breaking haul of 322. David Lynch was an early heavyweight death. Ozzy Osbourne died weeks after a showstopper final concert in the same summer that saw Brian Wilson and Sly Stone die days apart. All three musicians had a sheen of indestructibility to them, surviving years of drug demons and ultimately dying of old age issues (and Wilson was the personal death of the year for your outgoing co-host). One of the strangest was Gene Hackman, whose wife died suddenly of hantavirus, leaving a dementia-stricken Hackman without a carer and him dying days later a couple of weeks before both bodies were found. Francis and Ozzy were on the Drop 40, other 40 fallers include Prunella Scales, Linda Nolan, Roberta Flack, Steve “Mongo” McMichael, and that cunt Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Other music deaths were Marianne Faithfull, Connie Francis, Cleo Laine, Jimmy Cliff, Tom Lehrer, Mark Volman, Sam Moore, Jerry Butler, Mike Peters, David Johansen, Garth Hudson, Alf Clausen, and Lalo Schifrin. Acting had Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Val Kilmer, Jean Marsh, Joan Plowright, Patricia Routledge, George Wendt, Loretta Swit, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Chamberlain, Terence Stamp, June Lockhart, Udo Kier, Ruth Buzzi, and Pokémon voice James Carter Cathcart. Sport included Denis Law, Dickie Bird, Joe Bugner, Ricky Hatton, Bob Uecker, and Dick Button. Politics lost Dick Cheney, Norman Tebbit, Jose Mujica, Menzies Campbell, Ion Iliescu, Violeta Chamorro, and Muhammadu Buhari. Others were chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, Apollo 13 hero Jim Lovell, the Duchess of Kent, architect Frank Gehry, newsman Sandy Gall, wrestling phenom and racist Hulk Hogan, DNA phenom and racist James Watson, chess grandmaster Boris Spassky, children’s TV pioneer Biddy Baxter, JFK assassination bodyguard Clint Hill, and writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Brian Glanville, Frederick Forsyth, Jilly Cooper, and Jules Feiffer.
And some evergreen deadpooling threads finally tied up – ancient marathoner Fauja Fraudster Singh was a mainstay of centenarian theme teams for yonks despite exaggerating his age (and after all that was hit by a car), Supertramp singer Rick Davies was a Lee Evans gambit of nearly a decade ago (one of those to score points with him, Day in the Death, was among the tricked – DitD, a frequent title contender, has also now retired, and we wish him all the best), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler finally ended one of the all-time great WTF still alives of a mid-19th-century US president having a living grandchild. One can only imagine if 2100s deadpooling will have Trump grandchildren.
Some of pop culture’s great icons..… and Fauja Singh
The List of the Missed carried some surprises – Giorgio Armani was not only super famous but a hit on our sister site DeathList.net (the last time a DL hit was a DDP miss was Vincent O’Brien in 2009), and Mormon boss Russell M. Nelson and FBI director William Webster were both 101 and oft-discussed. Other misses included boxing and grill icon George Foreman, KISS’s Ace Frehley, other music names including David Ball, Wayne Osmond, Bobby Hart, Chuck Mangione, Rick Derringer, George Kooymans, Roy Ayers, and the classier side of Alfred Brendel and Roger Norrington, “Shakespeare in Love” playwright Tom Stoppard, farmer Tony Martin, Brit TV regular Tony Slattery, actors Michael Madsen, Jay North and Clifton Jones, actresses Loni Anderson, Pauline Collins, Samantha Eggar, and Lynne Marie Stewart, former US Supreme Court justice David Souter, Kramer vs. Kramer director Robert Benton, the burning man on Wish You Were Here Ronnie Rondell Jr, footballer Billy Bonds, ITV presenter John Stapleton, sound barrier-breaking skydiver Felix Baumgartner, seaborgium discoverer Darleane C Hoffman, and Dignitas founder Ludwig Minnelli, who, surely enough, left this world through his creation.
Both of the remaining Dionne quintuplets died, though curiously while Cecile was picked in the past, Annette never was. Among others never picked include Buffy actress Michelle Trachtenberg, R&B singers and former partners D’Angelo and Angie Stone, JFK granddaughter/would be on five million 2026 teams if she made it Tatiana Schlossberg, The Cosby Show actor Malcolm Jamal-Warner, the Jam drummer Rick Buckler, the Cure’s Perry Bamonte, voice of Space Ghost George Lowe, X Files theme composer Mark Snow, Pulp Fiction baddie Peter Greene, Beeb creative director Alan Yentob, footballer Diogo Jota, video game pioneer Rebecca Heineman, pioneering trans activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Moody Blue John Lodge, RuPaul Drag Racer The Vivienne, Stone Roses bassist Mani, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, Bollywood giant Dharmendra, and the assassinations of Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe and noble man (according to this random unrelated Bible passage) Charlie Kirk.
Another name never picked marks another of the year’s saddest for your co-host. Blondie drummer Clem Burke was an anchor in the group, eventually being the only member besides Debbie Harry to still perform live. His powerhouse performance on “Dreaming” is a particular standout moment in a group with no shortage of them. Can’t the Reaper go “I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha” to Sidney Cooke instead?
Deadpooling, deadpooling is free…
NQOs who probably deserved one: Masahiro Mori coined “uncanny valley”, Greg Bell won Olympic Gold, Tommy Hunt was in doo-wop legends the Flamingos whose “I Only Have Eyes For You” is a genre pillar, US politicos J. Bennett Johnston and George Nigh were surefire AP Mail locks a decade back, Donald Pelmear and Mary Peach were UK TV regulars, Nino Tempo of the Nino Tempo and April Stevens 60s pop duo never mustered an obit even though his sister did, mathematician Peter Lax won the Abel Prize, Costa Rican First Lady Marita Camacho Quiros was the longest lived individual with a non-age-related claim to vagueish fame, Diane Hoh was a popular horror author, Norman Kember’s captivity at the hands of Iraqi terrorists was all over the news twenty years ago, Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt’s gallivanting with Saddam and Gaddafi would make a colourful obit to say the least, Alison Knowles belonged to the innovative Fluxus movement, Ronald Venetiaan was former President of Suriname, and Roy Estrada was part of the Mothers of Invention (though also a repeat sex offender paedo so can’t fully blame the lack of media attention). At least we won’t be getting any local Kentucky softball coach QOs anymore with Yahoo out… or maybe we will with Mail still around.
And so it’s farewell to your front-page host of the past four years, DI. I’ve covered over a thousand deaths, downsizing from extensive obits to a more truncated form (to the relief of future pagerunners, no doubt), with more Gooseberry and Sulu jokes than you could shake 99 enemas at. I covered the defining death especially within British public life, a figure who has been there all our lives, then weeks after Bernard Cribbins I wrote about the Queen too. Farewelled personal favourites like Ronnie Spector to bêtes noires like Scott Thorson. It’s rare that an American pens the front page but I hope I did my best (so long as you pay no mind to some of the laziness around the front page that final year…).
Dr. NakaMats giddily watching the end of the DI era Scott Thorson never got to see…
But I’m tired now and it’s time for someone else to take over. Before going into my successor, a word of thanks. Those of us on DeathList can be a tight knit community and the DDP is a team effort. I give my thanks to msc for his guidance in helping me take over his role (and some of said guidance has paid dividends in teaching my successors the ropes of the DDP) and frequent insight on the obits and other bits and bobs. My committee co-members Reptile, GUN, Banana, and time who have all been great and efficient professionals. The DDP needed to be ran by a committee but those who helped in a guest capacity to further spread out the workload deserve further kudos: YoungWillz, Book, Spade, Toast, Rad, Joey, Clorox, Perhaps, LWCZ, Wannamaker, Evil Grimace, Whitehouse, Ulitzer, Gooseberry, Commtech, drunkasaskunk, and Dying Probably among others all contributed in some form, whether it be descriptions, pictures, or corralling hits/NQOs/misses. If I missed your name and you had helped in some way, it’s still appreciated.
With that out of the way, we’ve got a two-pronged hosting arrangement for the front page. First up, the eight-legged one is back after over 15 years since last hosting. Octopus of Odstock’s place in DDP history is well-established – host in 2008-09, retired from hosting due to real life obligations only to finish 2010 a DDP champion. He had largely withdrawn from deadpooling a few years later, due to real life obligations, but made a comeback this decade and has often been a challenger for the title. His return to the hosting fold is a welcome one and the first time a former DDP host has come back to the role.
However OoO still has obligations preventing a full-time hosting for the time being and is taking a backseat role at least for 2026, and so there’ll be a second co-host on the front page who will be doing the bulk of the emceeing. Marlfox has helped with the new bios in recent years, and though had largely been a lurker in our community has shown himself adept already in learning the ropes of managing the front page. We’ll be in good hands as we watch with bated breath to see if the Gooseberry turbo-enema of 2026 leavens Spade to seven.
If I should leave the DDP, it will still go on, believe me. God only knows what I’d be without you (taking over the front page). Play us out, Brian…