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...
A little something for our Icelandic readers now, as we bid a fond farewell to the former manager of Valur, KR Reykjavík and Keflavík. Ian Ross was a utility player, usually found in defence, who made his debut for Liverpool at the age of 20. Moving down south to Aston Villa in 1972, he became […]
More proof that politicians never keep their promises… John Dingell was the longest-serving Congressman in US political history, representing the state of Michigan from 1955 to 2015. He was the final serving Congressman elected in the 1950s, the last to have been a Congressman while John F. Kennedy was president, and joint-last Congressman to have […]
The angriest of the angry young men has calmed down for good. The son of a London bookmaker, Albert Finney studied at Rada and made his screen debut in 1960’s The Entertainer. The same year he starred in the landmark Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as the hard-drinking, harder-fucking Arthur. His name made, Finney became a true leading man, with […]
You keep picking Nobel Prize winners, I’ll keep running to Wikipedia to find obituaries for them. Manfred Eigen escaped from a Soviet prisoner of war camp in 1945 and walked on foot to the University of Göttingen, where he became part of the first post-Nazi student intake. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry […]
An unashamed populist writer, Rosamunde Pilcher cut her bones in the 1940s and 50s writing Mills & Boon romances under the pseudonym Jane Fraser (including the intriguingly/problematically titled Dangerous Intruder). She had a career as a writer of quantity rather than quality of sales until her 14th work, The Shell Seekers became a surprise success in the […]
A steady-if-unspectacular defender during his playing career (342 appearances for the likes of Borussia Dortmund and Werder Bremen), it was after retirement that Rudi Assauer made his indelible mark on German football. His first run as sporting director at Schalke ran from 1981 to 1986, after which he left the sport to play the real […]
Born Betty Adams, Julie Adams was a local beauty queen before she got the chance to join the Hollywood star system, becoming a contract player with Universal-International around the same time as Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. Most of her starlet career was spent in the world of westerns, providing a love interest […]
He may have been born in Dalby, Queensland, but few writers will ever be more associated with the city of Brisbane than Andrew McGahan. His debut novel, Praise, was a Bukowskian wander through the city at the turn of the 1990s – semi-autobiographical, and the country’s answer to Generation X or Less Than Zero. Future works included 2000’s […]
Few actors were as different as the character they’re most associated with than Clive Swift. To the public, he was Richard Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, the epitome of henpecked, downtrodden middle-of-the-middle class. In real life, he was a Shakespearean actor who wrote letters of complaint to newspapers when they called his alma mater (Clifton College Prep) […]
The DDP’s long-time Canadian theme team, Rushing to Tim Horton’s for Maple Donuts, is named after the country’s iconic coffee shop chain. It’s fitting, therefore, that they get a unique hit (and their first of the year) with the man who helped bring the world Timbits. Tim Hortons was set up by hockey star Tim […]
