Geoffrey’s showbiz career started in acting, so it wasn’t too surprising that when he first became a magician, he decided to do it in character. He performed as an outrageous Spanish magician called the Great Soprendo, wearing frock coats, frilly shirts, Cuban heels and a ludicrous quantity of bling. With his magic words Piff Paff Poof and a very silly manic giggle, the Great Soprendo pranced about the stage, insulting the audience at every turn, delighting in his own terrible old jokes (“I really am very, very big in the Balearics”) and gasping with shock at his own ability to do magic tricks.

The Great Soprendo was first seen only in the working men’s clubs of West Yorkshire, but it wasn’t long before he was achieving much wider recognition. Within five years, he was doing a forty-five minute act at the Duchess Theatre in London in the revue Funny Turns. He did the first half and Victoria Wood (virtually unknown at that time) was responsible for the second half.

During the run of the show there, he was spotted by Paul Ciani, the producer of Crackerjack, the long-running BBC television children’s show, and Ciani invited him to make regular appearances on the programme. This was a big success, and so began a long period of non-stop work on British television. The Great Soprendo appeared on Wednesday at Eight, London Night Out, The Keith Harris Show, The Krankies Elektronik Komik, KTV, The Video Entertainers, four Russell Harty Shows (including 3 Christmas Specials), two Children’s Royal Variety Performances, Number 73, Lift Off, Going Live, Saturday Superstore, Fun Factory, Talking Telephone Numbers… the list goes on and on.

And theatre began to play a big part. As The Great Soprendo, Geoffrey appeared in twelve major British pantomimes from 1977 to 1989, playing Abanazar, the Sultan of Morocco, Dame, the Emperor of China and always performing daft magic throughout the show. He performed regularly in Summer season, did his own one man children’s show at the Pier Theatre in Bournemouth for twelve weeks and even found himself working in a nude revue in Haifa, Israel. Now there’s showbiz glamour for you!

But as Geoffrey’s career in light entertainment progressed, so his interest in magic deepened. He started to get frustrated about all the stunning stuff he could be doing if he were performing as himself rather than as a Latin lunatic. So in 1986, without telling anybody, he took the decision to ditch the Great Soprendo, for better or worse. He planned the change carefully over two years and in 1988 he made his last appearance in the role. He went on The Des O’Connor Show, took off the wig and curly moustache and threw them in the bin. He embarked on what turned out to be an entirely new and in some ways quite different career.

Soon after the transition, he was lucky enough to be asked to be one of the hosts of Thames TV’s The Best of Magic, a series of twelve hour-long magic spectaculars featuring the greatest magicians in the world. Geoffrey was featured performing his own new brand of magic in each show and so he was able to showcase his new image successfully in front of millions of viewers every week. He changed his cabaret and close-up style, invented different and more baffling tricks and found himself working in a new way and in new venues all over the world.