Geoff Edwards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geoff Edwards (born on February 13, 1931 in Westfield, New Jersey) is an Emmy Award-winning American television actor, game show host and radio personality. Over the past decade and a half, he has developed a successful career as a writer and broadcaster on the subject of travel.
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[edit] Background
Edwards began his career while in college, working for a radio station in Albany, New York. By the late 1950s, Edwards headed west to Southern California, landing his first job at station KFMB. As a news reporter, Edwards was present in the basement of the Dallas Police Department when Jack Ruby shot suspected John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963. He was one of the witnesses interviewed by NBC Television Correspondent Tom Pettit after the assassination.
After a few short stints at other stations, Edwards was hired at KMPC in Los Angeles, occupying the 9 a.m.-noon slot for several years beginning in 1968. He has also worked at stations KFI and, most recently, was a morning DJ with KSUR (now KKGO) in Los Angeles.
During that time, Edwards tried his hand at acting, appearing on I Dream of Jeannie and Petticoat Junction. On the latter show, he met and maintained a very close friendship with Meredith MacRae.
In the early 1970s, Edwards appeared on The Bobby Darin Show as the straight man to singer Bobby Darin. After that series ended, Edwards pursued a game-show career, which he had been dabbling in since 1971, when he recorded two unsold pilots.
[edit] Game shows
His first full-time game show hosting stint took place from March through June 1973 on Jack Barry's Hollywood's Talking, a remake of a late 1960s ABC game Everyone's Talking and the Canadian hit Eye Bet. The program featured contestants watching a video clip of a celebrity talking about a subject; their job was to guess the subject in question. The series, which aired afternoons on CBS did not fare well and the network cancelled it in favor of the phenomenally popular Match Game remake.
Six months later, in January 1974, NBC hired Edwards to host the New York-based Jackpot. That series proved to be a modest success for Edwards, lasting nearly two years. That also led to a missed opportunity, as Mark Goodson was looking at Edwards to host a new game show, Family Feud, a gig which later went to Richard Dawson by virtue of that deal plus one with Jackpot producer Bob Stewart.
The previous Fall, Chuck Barris hired Edwards to host the weekly revival of the 1950s game show Treasure Hunt, entitled The New Treasure Hunt. He did the weekly version for four years (1973-77) and helmed a daily Treasure Hunt again for one year (1981-82). On Treasure Hunt, Edwards was required to memorize 30 skits (66 in the 1981-82 revival), due to the degree of security on the set, which extended to prohibiting cue cards.
Other game shows Edwards hosted over the years included the New York-based Shoot For The Stars in 1977, Chain Reaction (as a sub host in 1980 and a regular host from 1986-91), Starcade, Play the Percentages and a revival of Jackpot from 1989-90. Edwards also was a substitute host in 1985 of Let's Make a Deal.
Geoff is famous for his catch phrase, "Right you are!"
[edit] Other television work
Edwards was also co-host of the Los Angeles news program Mid Morning L.A. on KABC-TV, replacing Bob Hilton in the early 1980s and paired with co-host Meredith MacRae. Edwards and MacRae won an Emmy Award for best host and best hostess respectively for a news magazine series. The two would also host a unsold Bob Stewart-produced game show pilot, $50,000 a Minute, in 1985 for ABC.
In 1986, Geoff became host of The Big Spin, the game show of the California Lottery, and would remain host of that program until his retirement from television around 1994.
[edit] Present
In later years, Edwards traveled extensively, hosting traveling programs on both radio and television. He is now semi-retired and living in California, and continues to write extensively about travel.
[edit] Notes
Edwards holds the distinction of being one of the very few emcees to host a game show in Los Angeles and a game show in New York at the same time; he accomplished this feat in 1974 as the host of Jackpot in New York and Treasure Hunt in Los Angeles.
He is also one of three game show hosts to have emceed a game show in the United States and another in Canada concurrently (the other two were Alex Trebek and Jim Perry). Edwards, like Perry, commuted back and forth between Southern California and Montreal between 1989 and 1990, hosting Chain Reaction in Montreal and the syndicated revival of Jackpot in Glendale. However, Edwards was required to have a Canadian co-host on Chain Reaction, due to the fact that he had no ties to the country, unlike Trebek and Perry.
