USA Today reports that Game show host Geoff Edwards, best known for emceeing such programs as Jackpot! and Treasure Hunt during the 1970s and '80s, died on Wednesday at the age of 83. According to his agent Fred Westbrook, Edwards died of complications of pneumonia at St. John's hospital in Santa Monica.
Fellow game show host Wink Martindale, who worked with Edwards at LA's pop radio station KMPC said of the loss, "Geoff was one of the cleverest, funniest radio and television personalities I've worked with."
Edwards began his career as an actor, appearing on I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl and Petticoat Junction. He also guest starred on Diff'rent Strokes and Small Wonder. 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, starting with Says Who? in 1971, followed by Cop-Out!
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 Everybody'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.
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 for one year (1981-82).
Edwards was 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 California and Canada between 1986 and 1991, hosting The Big Spin and the 1989 revival of Jackpot! in Sacramento and Glendale and the
usa network version of Chain Reaction in Montreal. 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 (Trebek and Mandel are native Canadians; Perry had blood ties to Canada and lived in Toronto during the first several years of Definition). His commuting days ended after Chain Reaction left the air in 1991.
Edwards was famous for his catch phrase - "Right you are!" - which he frequently exclaimed after a correct answer.
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