msc

3rd with 414 points. All of which will scatter downwards (or upwards) to others now. When Zsa Zsa went, her 600 points subbed all over the place. That's over 800 points of sub work which now needs to happen. If another cancer sufferer (you know who I mean) snuffs it before Christmas, I might have to scream.

Aye, when a lung cancer patients goes into hospital in November for respiratory issues, their chances of making the list become very low indeed.

Aye, and all 4 of my 2017 certs living above might well be certs for folk in 2018.

Now I need to go find that Morley anecdote from here. EDIT - Here it is, quality Deathlist Forum anecdotage from a few years back. And no, not popular, hence being on Not the List of the Missed, but maybe posts like this will raise her profile for 2018's deadpooling season.

Aye, the very same, pretty sure. She is on my crap DDP theme team as the joker (purely down to alphabetical reasons). No one else had her.

If I were on the Cmme that'd sound like a challenge. I'm not, of course.

Come to think of it, CSN (and Y) formed 1968-ish, and somehow all 4 are still breathing as of this post.

Also: goodness, 18th Death of the Year thread. Never thought I'd actually see one of those.

On the above, when did ZZ Top start up, and aren't they all still going?

Been a bit of a Profumo Affair throwback year, hasn't it? Lucky Aloysius Gordon, Jeremy Hutchinson and now Keeler all gone, and Profumo himself back in the news for shagging spies in the 1930s. Oh, and Bogdanov (of a different Hutchinson case entirely) of course.

I'd just like to denounce Pierre Balmain and Sacha Distel here for dying years ago and ruining the follow up gag.

Oh there are a number of Shameless type picks out there - more than usual, by looks of it - but I am aiming to give them a wide berth. That's the passive "this dying person just exists, now they are dead" type picks of course...

I went for Kirk, because he's first on the list. Plus, it seems every year we get a top Hollywood demise around Christmas.

Joey has just doomed Greg Gilbert, no doubt.

I was in the middle of writing a "yeah, me too" post when I suddenly realised he is actually on my team. Cool. Nevermind that then!

Well done Sean!

Oh sorry, should put the BBC obit here.

RIP to him. I guess this years Deathlist did OK then.

So, around this time of year I try and work out who will die via sods law. There's a semi-tradition of the Deathlist dropping someone, seemingly for perfectly reasonable reasons, who then snuffs it soon after New Year. An extensive (but potentially not complete) list for example: 2017 - Robert Pirsig 2016 - Harper Lee 2015 - Shaw Taylor, Terry Pratchett 2014 - Richard Attenborough, General Jaruzelski, Pete Seeger, Elaine Stritch, James Garner 2013 - Bob Godfrey 2012 - Geoffrey Hughes, Jack Klugman, Ravi Shankar, Dom Mintoff, Ernest Borgnine 2010 - George Steinbrenner, Captain Beefheart, John Forsythe 2006 - JK Galbraith 2005 - Arthur Miller 2004 - Yassir Arafat 2003 - Buddy Ebson, Benny Carter 2002 - Princess Margaret, Mary Wesley, Bert Millichip 2001 - John Lee Hooker, Anthony Quinn 2000 - Alec Guinness, Victor Borge, Julian Critchley 1999 - Anne Haddy, Willie Whitelaw, Johnny Morris 1995 - Peter Wright, Harold Wilson 1994 - Doris Speed, Charles Bukowski 1992 - Magnus Pyke 1990 - Malcolm Muggeridge Going by that list, a sneaky pick on say, David Prowse or Gay Byrne in 2018 might provide dividends.

Three thoughts 1. I finally got an update up before someone reminded me to put up an update. 2. 22/50 in a year - bloody good going everyone, but you know, I think you can beat it in 2018... 3. Oh FFS, all the subs need to come into play now - King Michael was in 2nd place on the 2018 list as it stands!

Well, you asked for it, here it will be. This Saturday sees six weeks till Hogmanay, somehow, so that gives those who wish six weeks to PM names to me, or debate who should go on the list here. The 2016 list saw (insert finished total here) hits, a fine start. THE RULES Rules 1. Please send 50 names you think should be on the 2017 Deathlist to me by PM. Order them from 1 to 50. Please send them by PM, not by email, semaphore, Morse code, Deathlist live chat, animated corpses, text messages, or any other means of communication you can think of. 2. Your 1st choice will gain 50 points, 2nd 49, etc etc to 50th which will gain 1 point. 3. When the deadline passes, all of the points that an individual celebrity gain will be added together, and the top fifty celebrities with the most points overall will go on the Utterly Unofficial Forum List. 4. Feel free to add substitutes at the bottom of the list, which will only be counted if one of your fifty die before January 1st 2017. If for example your number one pick is such a smart one they die before January 1st, then I will give 50 points to your 2nd pick, and so on until 1 point is given to the first substitute. 5. Do try to make the picks as "Deathlisty" as possible. More Ken Barlow and less Ken Farlow, if you know what I mean. Someone likely to score an obit with one of the major English language news outlets. 6. The deadline for sending in entries is 31st December 2016 at midnight. That's 7pm New York Time (31st December) and 11am (1st Jan) Melbourne time to help out non-Brits. 7. This is essentially a forum game without a winner, hence my being unsure of its appeal. It does however put the long held notion by some that the combined minds of the forum know better than the Committee to the test. 8. Who picked whom will remain anonymous. 9. The paranoid probably shouldn't send in their DDP unique hopefuls. Whilst I have no intention of stealing them away, it would make no sense: if the person then showed up on the list, their chances of being unique would be very slim indeed! 10. To keep to the Deathlist spirit, only the top 25 ranked celebrites from the current list of Crowdsourced Deathlist 2016 survivors will be used: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rev Billy Graham, Clive James, Prince Philip, Olivia de Havilland, Jimmy Carter, Kirk Douglas, Helmut Kohl, Peter Sallis, George Bush Sr, Tony Booth, Vera Lynn, Herman Wouk, Denis Norden, Valerie Harper, Leslie Philip, Joost van der Westhuizen, Stephen Hawking, Sumner Redstone, Ian Brady, Glen Campbell, Mary Tyler Moore, Robert Mugabe, Liliane Bettencourt, Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, Sinead O’Connor, Former Pope Benedict XVI, Ian St John, Liz Dawn, Bruce Forsyth, Jake Lamotta, John Noakes, Prunella Scales, Bob Dole, Fernando Ricksen and Nobby Stiles. Some names there I don’t think anyone expected to be in contention for 2017, but there’s still time in 2016 yet. 10a) Our actual collated list will stick to the "25 from the previous year" rule. 10b) As a result, if our top fifty, after all votes have been counted, has more than twenty-five of the 2015 survivors (named for ease in Rule 10), then the lowest ranked excess survivors will be axed from the list in favour of The Fifty-First ranked celebrity and so on... 10c) Since we don't know if that'll be an issue until I actually do the counting, voters don't need to worry about limiting their personal lists to 25 survivors. It'd be nice if they did, but that's life. 11) Please pick living people. Folk do die before 1at January, but there were a few cases of people dead for a number of years chosen last time. Anyhow, enjoy. Or not.

KING MICHAEL EXILED FROM LIFE 22/50 5th December 2017 The former King of Romania, Michael, has died to give The Crowdsourced Deathlist another success. Michael was one of the few remaining WW2 leaders living. He had become King of Romania at the age of six on the death of his grandfather, after his father had been disinherited due to shagging about with his mistress. He was deposed twice, first by his own father, and then by pro-Soviet forces. Nethertheless, he helped to lead a coup against the pro-Nazi Romanian government in 1944, and claims the Soviets threatened to shoot 1000 students if he didn’t abdicate for the second and final time. After the fall of Communism, there was a period of antagonism between Michael and the Romanian governments, before his citizenship was restored in 1997. King Michael proved that rare thing, a monarch who wanted power but was unwilling to grab power, until the Romanian people wanted a monarchy back. Despite the former King being far more popular than the idea of a monarch, this might explain why he died still being the former King of Romania. Despite a love hate relationship with government, and a public who disliked the idea of monarchy, Michael remained one of the most respected figures in Romania into his 90s, and was frequently called on for diplomatic matters such as pleading Romania’s case to join NATO. He had stepped down from public duties after a diagnosis of leukemia, and lost his wife in August 2016, so it was no surprise to see our voters resoundingly placing him in 3rd place for the year.

TBH not very happy with my shortlist at all. Been too busy to do anything but the most cursory form checking. (I don't spend much time worrying about uniques, I figure every single one of them is on Gcreptile's shortlist...) Will be happy with a 4th top 50 spot in a row in 2018.

^ The Daily Mail later said he died, thus making the whole brouhaha pointless in the end.

100% if we can get the IBTimes as a qualifying obit. On a serious note, his health woes have been covered by the Beeb.