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...
Inspired to play guitar by the skiffle revolution, Larry Wallis was the gossamer-thin tie that bound the British summer of love, proto-metal and punk. Starting off his career with The Entire Sioux Nation (a bandname you probably couldn’t get away with today), he had short-lived spells with Bloodwyn Pig, UFO and Shergat before joining The […]
Suzanne Whang was a comedian and actor who was probably best known to the general public as the host of House Hunters, the show that set the format for every “rich people need to buy a home” programme that followed. However, she also went a pretty public battle with breast cancer that lasted some 13 years. […]
And the white man continues to keep Robert Mugabe down, ensuring that (as it stands) he has to share the title of most popular DDP hit for 2019… Fernando Ricksen joined Rangers in 2000 as part of Dick Advocaat’s Dutch revolution. He quickly acquired a reputation as a footballer who could start a fight in […]
Michael Edwardes, former chairman of British Leyland, was the country’s most famous businessman for a good half decade and arguably did more to spur the 1980s strain of business Thatcherism than anyone other than Maggie herself. Born in South Africa, where he was a promising squash player as a youth, he found himself at British […]
Akilisi Pohiva was the first commoner elected to the position of Tongan Prime Minister. Fittingly, his political career was characterised by clashes with Tongan monarchy: he was arrested for sedition in 2002 for claiming the king had a hidden fortune, and again in 2007 for his alleged involvement in the pro-democracy Nuku’alofa riots. He was […]
When it came to 1980s business reporting, T. Boone Pickens was straight out of central casting. He made his name, J.R. Ewing-style, with wildcat oil drills. He then became one of the era’s most fearsome corporate raiders, feared and loathed in equal measures across Wall Street. And he finished the decade as an unlikely environmentalist, pushing […]
Daniel Johnston looked like Artie Lange’s corpse after three days of bloating and made absolutely terrible music. There’s a good reason we don’t let “outsider musicians” inside, people. Still, enough people thought they were being edgy by listening to the man who did Nazi salutes on stage and was arrested for an incident in which […]
Brian Barnes was a hard-drinking, harder-smoking (he was 1977’s Pipe Smoker of the Year) golfer of the type you don’t get in these days of interchangeable Americans who all look like they’re called Brock or Jayden dominating the greens. His finest hour came during the 1975 Ryder Cup, where he became the only man to […]
Time to chalk off, in terms of numbers, the biggest DDP hit of the year thus far. And what can you say about Robert Mugabe? Well, he was a big Cliff Richard fan – indeed, he wanted The Peter Pan of Pop to play at Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations in 1980, rather than Bob Marley. He […]
The son of a doctor, Stan Cosgrove worked as a GP himself until his early 40s when he spotted a gap in the market: equine medicine. He soon became the preferred vet to nearly every major Irish racing trainer and set up the first private horse hospital in the British Isles. His expertise was so […]
