msc

Celia Imrie, Elaine Page, Felicity Kendall all feel like future Dames. Prunella Scales is one below and my gut feeling is if she gets one it'll be a deathbed one.

Jean Marsh isn't a Dame either, allegedly at her own refusal. We could add Claire Bloom and Joan Plowright next year as a running theme of people Laurence Olivier shagged.

Very sad news. Proper legend.

Ah, taking one for the team, bravo.

Won't see new year then, which is a surprise but probably a relief to the Cmme who couldn't be arsed of a whole year of DL Vs the cybernats.

@YoungWillz was astounded that this 80s children's entertainer (famous for narrating Thomas the Tank Engine in the UK - Americans had George Carlin iirc) didn't have his own friend. He appeared on the original Deathlist. So here he is, a thread for all things Starkey. Apparently he was also in a band back in the day.

Don't worry, a shithead will die before too long to balance it out.

Well he isn't a well man!

Happy birthday old chap!

His dad was Douglas Jay, the former Eurosceptic socialist Labour MP, and his ex-wife, Margaret, was daughter of Jim Callaghan. Became more interested in the Freidman/monetarist philosophy, himself.

Alan Greenspan and Alan Oppenheimer, thanks. Yeah, I'm short on inspiration.

RIP. Proper TV legend. tbh I was legit surprised he missed out on this years DL given age, frailty and UK fame, but the Cmme are a law upon themselves as we know.

On a much lighter note the Scottish Abstinence Society ran a PIF round the schools in 2001ish. Gist was two teenagers shag at a party and the next day at school... Don't want to talk to each other because of the shame. For real. All done super earnestly. It was absolute bollocks.

Some of these freaked me out as a kid. Don't play with electrical sockets or your hand might explode. School played that one. Itv used to show the iron falling on the kid advert before Thomas the bloody Tank. Some of the drink driving ones. Scarred for life. There's a Scottish schools version of Apaches, I forget the name, but I can still see the kid being buried alive by slurry.

Good.

Don Powell might be worth a slot on your theme team (if he qualifies @YoungWillz). From watching the godawful Mike Read show where he's a regular, he's noticeably declining over the last few years with his health issues. 2-3 years left at most imo.

You know, given how dry 2024 has been, when I saw this was the newest thread updated I thought "christ I hope 2024's drought isn't so severe that Osama's returned from the dead!" And I was nearly bloody right and all.

Hardliner Carry On fan. It's a shame as he was a fine actor - Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is one of the best of the cult sixties shows and he's part of the Dr Who family. But IMO two decades with COPD and being able to live a decent life for most of it, making it to your mid nineties, is jolly good going. Can't see Renny Lister lasting much longer.

When Mike Pratt got his diagnosis (he was a chain smoker), he wrote to all his closest friends imploring them to quit cigarettes. One of them was Colin Baker, who was so shocked by Pratt's death that he went from chain smoker to cold turkey for most of the last fifty years.

This was the first post I saw waking up and I was really confused for a moment. I'll take this jinx.

Political endorsement has been around for hundreds of years, nothing to do with modern society. Dickens endorsed Lord Russell in the 1840s, to the point where he was offered a seat in parliament (he turned it down). He was also famous for pushing his fans to go get vaccinated. Going back centuries earlier, writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer were so popular in their time that Shakespeare was oft accused of stirring the mob against the elite, and Chaucer himself may have been murdered because his endorsements were too powerful an enemy for a pretender to the throne. Anyhow, Michael Caine has been trying to get me to vote Tory for over two decades now, to no success, but I still enjoy a lot of his films.

George Burley having (unspecified type and stage) cancer is an interesting one, as he's approaching 70 and has been an alcoholic for large chunks of his life. Remember Christophe Daum, one to watch imo.

I think all the A list actresses from 1934 (IE Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Annette Crosbie, Eileen Atkins, Jean Marsh etc) are DLy as is 1933s Dame Sian Phillips. Of those several are very healthy for their age and can wait. That includes Dench who was on TV last month and beyond the whole blindness thing looked fairly robust. Marsh has been ill for a while (possibly borderline A list but it's my list and I don't care), and Smith has been reportedly frail for ages too. But in general I think most of them (Loren included) have great chances of being DL bedblockers by the end of this decade!

One of the first things he did when he was able to leave hospital in 2020 was to send a thank you letter to my wean for their get well soon card (they were a huge fan of Bear Hunt once) they sent him. I wish him all the best, he does look rough but he is on extra time, so to speak.

I stand by almost everything I said on January 1st on page six. All the really ill people then still are, they're just unusually all still alive. The 24 in 24 prediction might be slightly off, mind you.