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...
OLIVER DITCHED Former top cop Ian Oliver has died aged 82. A chief constable before he was 40, he first served for the Central Scotland Police and later the Grampian Police. No stranger to the media spotlight, he was noted for his opposition to drugs and frequent butting of heads with councillors. Scandal-mired final years […]
INCOMING TRANSMISSION LOST Communications have ceased for Star Trek trailblazer Nichelle Nichols at the age of 89. Now the inaugural crew is down to George Takei, Walter Koenig, and… William… Shatner. Nichols was primarily a musical theatre actress early in her career, and her ties to Gene Roddenberry predated the Enterprise – she guest starred […]
USURPED-ULA Pat Carroll, the voice of the nefarious, voice-snatching Ursula in The Little Mermaid, has been calamari’d aged 95. The first movie I saw in theatres, so my parents tell me. A US comedy mainstay for decades, a recurring role on Caesar’s Hour won her an Emmy and national attention. The perky blonde was a […]
WE’LL NEVER FIND ANOTHER HER Australian folkie Judith Durham has shed her dowdy feathers and flew aged 79. A little bit. Judith Cock strangely adopted her mother’s maiden name for her musical career, which began as a jazz pianist with Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers before joining forces with the Seekers. Anchored by Durham’s lead vocals […]
HE. IS. GONE! The dean of US sportscasting has made his last call. Vin Scully began working as an announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950, when he was in his early twenties, and by age 25 he broadcast his first World Series. His early highlights included capturing the Dodgers’ first World Series win in […]
SLAM DUNK What seemed like the third wheel of a difficult triple whammy for geeks quickly changed to relief after they realised this was the basketball one. Bill Russell was one of the very best to dribble the orange ball, and often cited as the sport’s greatest player pre-Jordan. A center for the Boston Celtics, […]
THERE HE WAS, A-DIGGING THIS HOLE… National treasure Bernard Cribbins has died aged 93, causing unanimous mourning in a way very few achieve. With a 70-year career spanning everything from comedies to Doctor Who to children’s TV, he became an omnipresent legend with generations of fans. It is a testament to his stature that the […]
EXPAIA HYPOTHESIS Prominent independent scientist James Lovelock has cast a damper on his 103rd birthday by dying on it. Less of a damper than what he forecasts for the rest of us, but we’ll get to that. An environmental icon, he was most famed for his Gaia hypothesis, which theorises that the Earth is a […]
SIGNED, SEELER, DELIVERED Almost a year after we farewelled Gerd Müller, another of German football’s greatest strikers has been struck down. Uwe Seeler began his career with his hometown club Hamburger SV, where he quickly established himself as a star player adept at overhead kicks and scoring from tricky angles. His 137 goals scored for […]
POP ART GIANT FALLS Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg has been buried under a larger-than-life tombstone, aged 93. The most prominent European associated with the US pop art movement (he was a Swede who immigrated to the States at a young age), a stint as a journalist saw him report on an old man who accrued […]
