msc

Francis Bay, Fergie Frederiksen (because he appeared on the Deathlist, I assumed he must have been more of note than I'd thought), Doctor Who writer Jane Baker and Nick Bockwinkel are the only folk to never get a qualifying obit which really surprised me.

21st October 2019.

Douglas Adams was never going to do City of Death it was just not worth it for him but his estate have allowed other writers to do CoD, Shada & The Pirate Planet. I do not insist Saward writes the books but allows them to be written. James Goss who adapted CoD got closer in tone to Adams than Eoin Coifer in the official Sixth Hitch-hiker book. From memory, Adams line was that he wasn't going to let anyone else write them, and he might go round to it eventually. It's in the Neil Gaiman biography. Any book would be improved by not having Eric Saward write it.

The fact Douglas Adams died before writing the City of Death book is far worse, to my mind. Or for the new series, in fact. Just think, if Russell T Davies had commissioned Adams back in 2003, we might be getting near to seeing the episode any decade now...

He'd be haunted if he ever came on this forum and saw the "Dead" sign next to the Beegees.

Well, he does sort of kill all the Sea Devils. And several Ogrons, and a few Ice Warriors in Monster of Peladon from memory. The Doctor/Brigadier relationship ending after The Silurians might have been more realistic, but them sticking together made the series more fun, imho. Mind you, the Brigadier is synonymous for a lot of fans with Nick Courtney himself. Mum met him, he was apparently lovely.

Colin is the weakest of the classic Doctors, but Davison and McCoy are good. I was thinking more of the stunt casting like Beryl Reid and Nicholas Parsons, who actually fit into their respective shows really well. The Third Doctor is full of violence, but awesome. Tom Baker's Doctor was more of the "other way" type, but then he had the wonderful moment in Seeds of Doom where he jumps through a skylight, punches a henchman, saves Sarah Jane and pulls a gun on the main villain. "Just what do you do for an encore, Doctor?" "I win!" I think its more on screen deaths than Terminator, for Resurrection: I once tried to count the number of on-screen deaths, and lost track around 40. In a kids show.

No idea, but Fitba North is claiming Fort won 1-0.

JN-T was probably underrated at the whole producing bit - ie his job. Budgets and casting (let's ignore Bonnie Langford here for a moment) and that kind of thing. Fans bemoan how he kept adding random trips abroad to the show, but then, he managed to budget them in. Even at the end of the McCoy era, there was still, for example, enough of the budget left over to have filmed a 5th episode of The Curse of Fenric if need be. (But apparently attempts to show the show wasn't a drain of money just led to the Grade types cutting the budget further...) Also he did some of the direction on Fenric and it's pretty seamless. Where he wasn't that good - ignoring his people person skills - was the creative side. This wouldn't have mattered if he had a good script-editor on board. Alas, he had Eric Saward, who was bloody awful. A case in point being during Trial of a Time Lord when some of the scenes didn't make sense to the cast. A shock, I know. Colin Baker asked what they meant to the director, who told him to speak to Saward. Saward brushed them off with an "oh, ask the writer". So Baker did ask the writer, who was Philip Martin - fairly acclaimed for Gangsters, etc - who told him these scenes weren't in the script he wrote! Also, he's on record, many times, as not understanding why a "pacifist" hero would be interesting to kids. Idiot. Also, Tom is Tom is Tom. "Tom Baker is the only man I know who, as he gets older, is slowly going sane", as Barry Letts once put it.

Yes, that and another poster putting her high pretty much snuck her on the list. A wise choice.

Possibly, but she did work in front of the cameras for the BBC news prior to being ill (as a weather reporter), so more Helen Fawkes than a member of Team Shameless. The BBC documentary she made - both of them, actually - is very good, incidentally.

American weatherman Geoff Fox, who actually got a Daily Mail article about him in 2012 due to a sexting scandal, has pancreatic cancer.

Vera Wins Gold for Crowdsourced Deathlist 11/50 30th August 2016 One of the most successful Olympians of all time, gymnast Vera Caslavska, has died at the age of 74 to give The Crowdsourced Deathlist another success. She won eleven medals (including seven golds) over three Olympic Games from 1960 to 68, but was later blocked from competing and even working by the Communist Czechoslovakian government due to her being the public face of opposition to the Soviet invasion of her homeland. After the fall of the USSR, Caslavska worked with the government of Vaclav Havel. Caslavska died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, and is the 11th hit this year.

I forgot she made the list. Will update later tonight, once wean's asleep.

My empathetic side thinks that's a shame, she seemed nice. My deadpooler side thinks "Fourth place (providing acceptable QO of course)! I wonder how Joost is doing..."

Russian army will be in Uzbekistan to "restore peace" by Boxing Day.

Safe until her mid 80s then! (Although, it was the NE who reported the Gene Wilder dying story iirc, so chalk another one up for their accidentally accurate wild mass guessing there...)

That's the new lead now, isn't it? Could have potential for an interesting upset if he gets lucky with his remaining differentials and if the likes of Christie surprise us by defying the odds... 122 days left of the year. It's like watching the cycling, someone breaks from the pack to lead but have they done it too early? Hey, there's probably a darts metaphor but I don't know darts. I feel there's still a big bomb to go off though - a rugby player, or a singer, or a drone target, for example. Or even the lesser spotted Delpech obit.

I can't answer that, but I do know that I'd heard of him before his illness, and I'm a Scot. Admittedly from people moaning about him on social media but hey, it all counts.

Oooh, Chorizo had Caslavska too! That's interesting!

In early January I was looking over everyone else's teams posted in this thread. There were three names I'd cut from my final 25 that I'd be most unsure about axing, and thought that if they were to all die, any shock Pan Breed title run would be up the swanny. They were Peter Esterhazy, Vera Caslavska and Thomas Fekete. Still, these things happen. DDT has four whole months to manage a clean sweep now: 17 gone, 3 to go.

I only really watched darts when Sid Waddell was around. I saw some of the UK Open (?) on ITV4 earlier this year and had only really hard of the convicted sex offender. Glad I got a mention in this list even if it was as a list compiler who is not as psychotic and insightfull as other posters. Thanks msc for all your work. Unusual Suspects A new team, possibly on the up, although still to break a top 100 finish and fond of the old age and gut feeling picks over the terminally ill. Although, as Deathlist top chap Grim Reaper once noted, scoring with an old age hit out of nowhere is more satisfying than predicting the terminally ill going. The team scored a unique 13th of the month bonus on Blake's Seven star Gareth Thomas. Bibliogryphon is better known on the Deathlist forum for his stewardship of the Byelection Bingo and the Scavenger Hunt Deadpool, the latter of which is currently annoying me as I wished I'd picked Hanif Mohammed in the cricket section. He shares yours truly's love of the list, and seems to take light-hearted jokes about this better than a random hypothetical person might have taken an edited out joke above about "TMIB having the patience of a saint, as seen by him spending three years with Deathray bemoaning every aspect of the DDP without ordering a hitman". *innocent face*. He is also Bibliogryphon's Bookworm Food, which finished 7th in the Theme Team League of 2014. There you go.

RIP Gene Wilder. As a child of my generation, I knew him first and best as Wonka. And sympathies to all his fans - I know a few folk on here are long on record as big fans of the man. I know how you feel. Even though he was old and ill, Patrick Macnee's death last summer still did for me, and even now I find it hard to watch The Avengers yet.

"Real" one WTF? Does that make the wrestler a licenced character and about as "real" as Roland Rat? Superstar Billy's real name is Eldridge Coleman. Not quite got the same ring.

Are the really old team lists still around? Yeah, knocking about somewhere. I never got rid of them, just put them aside to make way for the newer stuff. I am concerned about space being taken up on the server, particularly when you consider the pictures that are added every year. They may individually be anything from 4k to 13k but they all add up and there are thousands! There will be some reconstruction work done on past years pages in the next few months, rolled out over time which will mean less pics of celebs - only the ones who passed away in a particular year, as is the case from 1996-2003... Genuine question - do we actually need the pictures? Sounds like it could be less strain on the website AND host if they weren't there. I mean in the "List of Celebrities" each year.