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...
In late December 2018, the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke gave an interview with The Courier-Mail newspaper saying that he wouldn’t be alive for the 2019 general elections. And in a rare case of a politician sticking to promises made during campaign season, he has now died a mere two days before Australia went […]
And it looks like nine DDP teams won’t need pants for the victory dance after I.M. “Weasel” Pei has finally died aged 102. Pei followed in the footsteps of other long-living, bed-blocking architects like Oscar Niemeyer, who carked it at 104. Born in Guangzhou, China, Pei decided to study in the United States after becoming […]
The Drop 40 is back in business baby, and beloved American entertainment figures from the Johnson administration are gonna pay! Fast on the heels of Doris Day laying down for some final pillow talk, comedian and actor Tim Conway has been court-martialed from McHale’s Navy. Conway was a radio DJ who was discovered Rose Marie […]
When we were just a little dead pool, we asked Doris Day, when will she die? Will it be 2004? Will it be 2005? Will she ever be the second Drop 40 hit of the year at an embarrassingly late date? Yep, the wide-eyed girl-next-door, Hollywood legend and friend of closeted gay actors everywhere, Doris […]
Brian Walden’s first love was chess, but was discouraged (read: physically beaten) out of pursuing it as a career by his working class, Irish Catholic mother. So he turned to his second love, politics, while studying at Oxford. He was a vocal supporter of then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and even wrote some of the […]
Freddie Starr’s father was an alcoholic bare-knuckle boxer, who broke both his son’s legs on at least one occasion. As a result, the young star was put into care homes for a while, where he developed a taste for showbiz. He appeared as a child actor in films like Violent Playground with David Macallum before forming […]
One of the “to do” tasks in the DDP in-tray is going through some of the facts and figures and pulling out any interesting statistics. A kind of “OptaDeath”, if you will. However, I’m 99% sure we can say that Sprent Dabwido is the first ever DDP hit from the nation of Nauru. A former […]
In 2019, lindy-hopping may have a reputation of an artform solely for vintage dressing-wearing white people who can sit through more than 25 seconds of Postmodern Jukebox without vomiting, but it was originally an authentic, vital African-American artform. And its last living great performer, up until congestive heart failure saw her off a few days […]
Another name that took its time coming through with a qualifying obituary was David McNee. McNee was the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police throughout that famously law-abiding, copper-respecting period of 1977 to 1982. A brief runthrough of the highlights of his five-year reign: The Iranian Embassy siege, which he was in charge of operations against […]
With the deaths slowing down slightly after a hectic few weeks, obituary desks are taking the opportunity to clear their Evernote “to do” lists. Among those to get a tardy pass for their tardy passing is the cricketer Alan Moss. Moss was a right-arm fast-medium bowler who opened the order for Middlesex in the 1950s […]
