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...
The Celtic team of the early 1960s was arguably the worst in its history, with a creaking organisational hierarchy and a spell in which they failed to claim any major silverware. However, in 1965, their former reserve team coach Jock Stein returned to the club as manager. One of his first moves as boss was […]
If there’s a day for the dead to return to life, it’s Easter Sunday. If there’s a TV show where a dead character should return to life, it’s Dallas. And it looked like Ken Kercheval had the double for a while there, before ruining it all by actually being dead. The Dallas star, who played […]
To some Lorraine Warren (and her husband Ed, who predeceased her in 2006) were America’s first great paranormal investigators, fearlessly exposing a demonic infiltration of their New England backyard without asking for a dime in return. To others, they were fundamentalist scam artists deliberately targeting Catholic families and making a fortune from associated endeavours. The […]
A true borderline case… you could argue that Keith Cass was only “famous for being ill”, but I feel he did enough in his life to earn a frontpage post rather than relegation to the obituary vault. Cardiff-born Cass was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006 and promptly founded the Red Sock awareness campaign encouraging […]
Unknown to non-genre readers, Gene Wolfe was regarded as perhaps the finest living fantasy writer at the time of his death. His quartet work opus The Book of the New Sun, released between 1980 and 1983, was regarded by no less an authority than Locus magazine as secondary only to Tolkien in the genre’s history. […]
Ingmar Bergman’s…. shall we say complicated relationship with blonde actresses made Alfred Hitchcock look like an asexual with a slight preference for brunettes. Perhaps no actress best epitomised the Berman Blonde than Bibi Andersson. Bergman discovered her when he was reduced to filming TV commercials for soap during an early career downswing, and they went […]
I’m so, so sorry. We’ve been a bit busy at DDP Towers recently, and as a result are so late on Tommy Smith’s obituary that the newspapers have already moved on from paying tribute to the legendary Liverpool defender and are now reminding everyone that he was a big old racist. A racist Liverpool legend, […]
It does feel as though Ivor Broadis had been England’s oldest former international since about 1973, so it’s no surprise that we finally bid farewell to him in 2019. He served with the RAF during the Second World War, but never saw active service. He got plenty of action on his return to civilian life […]
Georgia Engel got off to an inauspicious career as an actor. Her first job was in an off-Broadway show called The House of Blue Leaves, for which she was paid one dollar a performance. The theatre then burned down. That fire was a blessing in disguise, though. The House of Blue Leaves moved to Los […]
The last surviving participant in the Doolittle Raid has, like the monkey, gone to heaven. Richard Cole was co-pilot of the first flight of said raid, which saw more than 80 US Air Force individuals take to the sky in the first significant aerial attack on the Japanese mainland following Pearl Harbor. Although the attack […]
