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 sommelier Gerard Basset decided to move to England after watching Liverpool beat his Saint-Etienne team in the 1977 European Cup. He went on to become one of the most highly regarded noses in the world of wine: the only person to win all five of the major wine-tasting awards (Master of Wine, Master Sommelier, […]
Yep, Carol “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” Channing has finally gone down for the count. Channing began her Broadway career in 1941, as an understudy to Eve Arden. She went on to originate the role of Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, which would set the tone for the rest of her career: as a […]
A great example of how deadpooling has been changed by the traffic needs of British news organisations. Mel Stottlemyre Sr was a baseball player who had been afflicted by cancer, on and off, since 1999. His original DDP bio read “Very unlikely to get a UK obit.” However, it’s 2018 and, upon Mel reaching strike […]
Michael Atiyah, former president of the Royal Society, was widely seen as the greatest living British mathematician before God divided him by zero. His two most important discoveries were the Atiyah–Singer index theorem (which proved that for any elliptic differential operator on a compact manifold, the analytical index is equal to the topological index) and […]
The daughter of 1940s country music stars Red Foley and Judy Martin (who died of an unexplained drug overdose without leaving a note, during a pending divorce, aged 34) Shirley Foley married Pat Boone when the pair were both 19. Both strongly Christian in their beliefs, Boone turned down movie roles that would involve him […]
And so we come to the first big (ish) DDP death of the year. Steffan Lewis was a Plaid Cymru elected to the National Assembly in 2016 for Plaid Cymru. His ministerial post was as Plaid Cymru’s official Brexit spokesman, and unsurprisingly he decided dying slowly of bowel cancer was a more pleasurable proposition. Lewis […]
One of the many intriguing subplots among the DDP this year is a clash between two debuting theme teams, who unbeknownst to each other were submitted very close together, with exactly the same name – Coda -, and similar themes: music vs classical music. The one submitted later has been awarded the indignity of having […]
Jakiw Palij was a former guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland. In 1943, as part of Operation Harvest Festival, all 13,000 Jews imprisoned at the camp were massacred in a single day and their bodies incinerated in a sonderkommando. Palij moved to the US after the war and obtained US citizenship in 1957, […]
Does a deadpooling year really begin until “the oldest person in America” dies? This time round it’s Lessie Brown, who left school in 1915. The grandchild of slaves, Brown worked on farms and as a hotel maid in her younger days. She attributed her longevity to a teetotal lifestyle and regular consumption of sweet potatoes. […]
A former television broadcaster, Larry Langford managed to fit a lot into his one term as mayor of Birmingham, Alabama. His tenure started with revelations that he’d just happened to have won $1.5 million in a series of jackpots at a donor’s casino, and ended with him in prison after being found guilty of accepting […]
