James Watson – d. November 6th 2025

Science is a poem without rules,
a solution to a twisted conundrum.
Inside this poem are the molecules
which make up every other poem,
written, forgotten or yet to come. 

Read about James Watson here

Pauline Collins – d. November 5th 2025

Take this role as a gift in two acts,
your audience willing you to risk
what they never could. Leave them
with your lines ringing: why do we
get all this life if we don’t use it?

Read about Pauline Collins here

Diane Ladd – d. November 3rd 2025

I saw you rouged in a dead man’s gore.
I saw you work the diner. I saw the silence
in your eyes fueling that barbed kindness,
and though you don’t live there anymore,
still I can never rinse away that wildness.

Read about Diane Ladd here

Tcheky Karyo - d. October 31st 2025

I am the prince of melancholy,
my face an unchanging moon,
my voice like low tide. There is
drama in my stillness. You think
you know what I’m thinking?
You will know when I tell you.

Read about Tcheky Karyo here

Peter Watkins - d. October 30th 2025

The content of this Otwituary
has been judged to be too
horrifying for social media;
no firestorms burning through
Home Counties, no fallout, no
looters shot on the street, only
this nightmare, filmed as truth.

Read about Peter Watkins here

Prunella Scales – d. October 27th 2025

I hear a laugh from another room,
the sound of Medusa cross-bred
with a hyena. To see her up close
is to step closer to death; death
by stare, by word, by comic gelding.

Read about Prunella Scales here

 

Tony Adams – d. October 26th 2025

I saw Mephistopheles checking out
of the semi-derelict motel just off
the Kings Oak bypass; moustache,
and sta-prest suit, already on his
third flirtation of the day, recording
each soul in a double-entry ledger.

Read about Tony Adams here

Dave Ball – d. October 22nd 2025

Life is a non-stop cabaret, and this is
the sound of the house band, pitched
somewhere between bliss and blitz,
songs to dance to, songs of despair,
battle-scars of all the good times.

Read about Dave Ball here

Samantha Eggar – d. October 15th 2025

Beauty begets terror, terror begets horror;
before you can blink, you see the screen
closing in like the walls of a cell, noticing
that each role is darker than the last.

Read about Samantha Eggar here

Tony Caunter – d. October 13th 2025

Would you buy a used plotline
from this man, who looks like
a bear but walks like a stray dog,
cuckolded in the name of drama,
looking for love and a quiet pint
in a postcode that doesn’t exist.

Read about Tony Caunter here

Diane Keaton – d. October 11th 2025

In the movies, there is always more than
mere love and death; what about those
dizzy ingénues, women caught between
socialite and socialist, the lost and the
sweetly damaged, playing for laughs in
the diners and bedrooms of our hearts? 

Read about Diane Keaton here

John Lodge – d. October 10th 2025

Isn’t life strange? I have lived mine
through music, each era a disguise,
each movement like a new religion.
Not for me the future in the past;
I would have given anything to be
the singer in a rock’n’roll band. 

Read about John Lodge here

John Woodvine – d. October 6th 2025

Whenever I change channels
there is the residue of a face
in the blink before and after
static, a man of a thousand
faces, all of them the same,
all carved from cold stone. 

Read about John Woodvine here

Jilly Cooper – d. October 5th 2025

I write this from my lover’s unmade bed,
far from her paddocks and gymkhanas.
She dresses me in hunting pinks, asks
me to spank her with her daddy’s crop
before handing me a novel, sighing,
saying Why can’t you be more like him?

Read about Jilly Cooper here

Patricia Routledge – d. October 3rd 2025

Here is the mirror of a furtive England;
telephone voices and antimacassars,
foundation garments and Rotary Clubs,
the arch drama of sweet domesticity,
artificial and yet authentic all at once. 

Read about Patricia Routledge here

Jane Goodall – d. October 1st 2025

I ask, one primate to another,
where I came from, imagining
my simian family on their lonely
hillside, their devoted steward
offering gifts of love and curiosity,
holding out a hand like a mother.

Read about Jane Goodall here

Brian Patten – d. September 29th 2025

It’s 1967; the master of scenes is found
lying on a park bench in a city of words,
reciting poetry in his sleep, the sound
of a place, a time that won’t come again.
But vanishing tricks are two for a pound
round here, and all that’s left now is rain.

Read about Brian Patten here

Bobby Hart – d. September 10th 2025

Airwaves drip with saccharine
in a poisonous world, but there’s
a song that’s getting the funniest
looks from everyone it meets.
A man smiles, takes the last train,
forever blowing bubblegum. 

Read about Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart here

Menzies Campbell - d. September 26th 2025

Don't you long for the old politics;?
Where the middle way is still a way,
where to have convictions does not
mean that you have been convicted,
where the race is only with oneself
and the mediocre need not apply.

Read about Menzies Campbell  here

Danny Thompson - d. September 23rd 2025

At the root of everything is bass; a fluid
heartbeat picked out on four fat strings.
Let them talk about technique; style is
the only style, trusting your ears to tell 
your fingers where to go, what to say.

Read about Danny Thompson here