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...

DDP 2019 In Review: Jefferson Starship

Sorry about this year-end summary being a little late, I had some business to attend to over in the Middle East. Should widen the list of possible candidates for 2021… So that was 2019. Ole took the wheel and drove his team straight into mid-table, Jezza took the wheel and drove his party straight into […]

Tony Britton

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 […]

Ram Dass

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 […]

Martin Peters

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

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, […]

Thomas Pearson

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 […]

Nicky Henson

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. […]

Anna Karina

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 […]

Sheila Mercier

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 […]

David Bellamy

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 […]