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...
And with that, there are no more survivors of the 1944 Stalag Luft III breakout bid – more commonly known as “The Great Escape”. Although Dick Churchill was the last survivor of those who actually escaped, Jack Lyon was the final figure involved in the planning and execution. Unfortunately Gerry got wind of the plan […]
While the teenagers of this fair land fall under the thrall of US serial killers thanks to Netflix, it’s important we don’t neglect the good ol’ psychopathic murderers from Blighty. Take Angus Sinclair, widely believed to be Scotland’s most prolific serial killer. Nicknamed the “World’s End Killer” after the pub in Edinburgh he tracked two […]
The former Archbishop of York John Habgood was a man whose career can be defined by two feuds. The first was with Margaret Thatcher, who viewed him as far too liberal to ever get the top gig in the Church of England (Archbishop of Canterbury) and made sure he never got down the A1. Habgood […]
It’s been a bit of a wait, but finally the DDP gets some head. Bernice McCabe, one of Britain’s best-regarded headteachers, to be precise. Our Bernie died in mid-February, but only now have the Times seen fit to bless her with a full-scale obituary. And she was certainly worthy of one: a lengthy career in […]
It’s a sign of how far he’d fell in his career that Jan-Michael Vincent’s death went unnoticed by the wider world for nearly a month. He was at one point considered the heir apparent to James Dean, and was indeed discovered by the same agent as the Giant star. If he’d died in the 1970s, […]
The Pete Best of mod rock… Doug Sandom was a bricklayer by trade, but had a sideline playing drums for a variety of London-area bands at the turn of the 60s – most notably a bunch of upstarts called The Detours. However, he was already in his mid-30s by the time The Detours got close […]
A cornerstone of the Glasgow Rangers side of the late 1950s and early 60s, Eric Caldow played 265 games for the Bluenoses, eventually becoming the club’s captain. He wore the armband as they competed in the first Cup Winners Cup final (losing 4-1 to Fiorentina) and won a total of five league titles at Ibrox. […]
As a player, “Terrible” Ted Lindsay was a never-say-die pitbull of a hockey star, who made up for his diminutive stature (he was just 5’8) with a rough-house rink-style and a penchant for elbowing his way through games. He formed part of the Detroit Red Wings’ “Production Line”, alongside fellow future hall-of-famers Sid Abel and […]
Nicknamed the “Machete Murderer”, at one point Juan Corona was the most prolific known serial killer in U.S. history. His star may have faded in the past 40 years but we’ll give him his props here. Born in Mexico, Corona came to the US at the age of 16 to work as a picker on […]
Dublin-born, Cork-raised, Kevin Roche had a career as a quintessentially American architect after moving to the country aged 26. He worked as an assistant to the legendary Eero Saarinen up until Saarinen’s death, at which point he took over the man’s projects – including St Louis’ Gateway Arch and the TWA Flight Center at JFK […]
