Geoff Edwards
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Geoffrey Oswald "Geoff" Edwards (born on February 15, 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. One of the features of his radio show was "Radio's Answer Lady," in which listeners could call in with questions--some serious, some not so serious--and he would answer on the air, sometimes with serious answers, sometimes with quips.
During that time, Edwards tried his hand at acting, appearing on I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl 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 and Bob Stewart Productions hired Edwards to host the New York-based Jackpot. That series proved to be a modest success for Edwards, lasting nearly two years. 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).
Other game shows Edwards hosted over the years included the New York-based Shoot For The Stars in 1977, Chain Reaction (as a substitute host for Bill Cullen in 1980 and a regular host from 1986-91, having taking over from Blake Emmons), 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. Shoot may have led to a missed opportunity, as Mark Goodson was looking at Edwards to host a new game show, Family Feud, a gig which eventually went to Richard Dawson.
Edwards 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 an 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. Geoff appeared on GSN Live on May 16, 2008.
[edit] Notes
He is also one of four game show hosts to have emceed a game show in the United States and another in Canada concurrently (the other three were Howie Mandel, 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, Mandel and Perry (and Canadian TV policy states that shows must have at least one Canadian-born TV personality to qualify itself as being a Canadian show). Edwards also hosted the The Big Spin in California while traveling to Canada for Chain Reaction.
| Preceded by Blake Emmons |
Chain Reaction Host 1986 – 1991 |
Succeeded by Dylan Lane in 2006 |
| Preceded by Chuck Woolery |
Host of The Big Spin 1986-1994 |
Succeeded by Larry Anderson |
