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...
Arte Johnson didn’t start acting until his mid-20s, and didn’t make any serious headway on TV for another decade. Perhaps his most notable role to a UK audience before his major breakthrough was as Samantha’s mute cousin Edgar in a first series episode of Bewitched. However, he broke through fully in 1968 with a regular role […]
Thanks to his unusual name (he was the son of Italian immigrants), Lee Iacocca had a lengthy legacy as a “funny namedrop” for American comedians. But he achieved so away from those five syllables, and has a claim to be the greatest American CEO of all-time. Starting with Ford as an entry-level engineer after World […]
Beth Chapman (nee Barrmore) was the fifth person to marry Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman, and the woman who had the fortune of being his wife while he managed to keep a vague cap on his substance abuse issues and got himself a TV deal. She was with him while he successfully tracked down […]
We heard him knockin’ so we let him in… Dave Bartholomew amassed over 4,000 songwriting credits over his 100 years on Earth, being a key figure in rhythm ‘n’ blues’ transformation into rock ‘n roll. A New Orleans native, he brought the city’s jazz and brass beats to the opening years of rock ‘n’ roll, […]
Born in Hungary but educated in Switzerland, George Rosenkranz was one of a number of promising Jewish scientists who were helped in escaping from the shadow of Axis Germany by Nobel Prize winner Leopold Ruzicka. Rosenkranz was traveling to a new post in Ecuador when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and thus had to settle for […]
As always, it’s the smaller deaths that make the biggest impact on the DDP… Helen Legh had been a fixture on BBC Three Counties Radio for over a decade, progressing from the early breakfast slot for a Milton Keynes audience to helming the Sunday morning show across the whole region. That was until a big […]
Gloria Vanderbilt’s father, Reginald Vanderbilt, was a degenerate gambler and alcoholic. That’s bad. He died when she was just 18 months old, from liver cirrhosis. That’s also bad. However, because he was fantastically wealthy – even with all the money frittered on fast women and slow horses – he was able to leave her $2.5 […]
Maria Giuseppa Robucci was the oldest person in Europe at the time of her death, having been born a month before Atletico Madrid were formed as a football club. She lived her entire life in the small Italian town of Poggio Imperiale, where she worked on a farm (she was still able to chop wood […]
And the man whose version of Romeo and Juliet has enabled English teachers to just wheel the TV out and not worry about planning for two lessons leaves us. The bastard child of two fashion industry workers, Franco Zeffirelli’s mother wasn’t allowed to use his father’s name on birth documents, so she made up the surname “Zeffirelli” […]
The late 1960s was the heyday of the drug-taking messianic brainwashing cult, and Australia got its own slice of the action in the shape of Anne Hamilton-Byrne. A former yoga teacher who believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, AHB’s “The Family” cult adopted a string of children from orphanages and social services. They […]
