Comic possibilities

He is particularly known for his caricatures of snooker players, and this year's World Snooker Championship (April 15 - May 1) will see Geoff appearing live on TV during the coverage, drawing the top players and chatting to them as well. He first became involved with the championship rather by accident, almost 20 years ago, when he drew a cartoon of former player Ray Reardon ("for fun") and showed it to Rex Williams, the champion billiards player who happened to live nearby.

"Rex was the head of the professional billiards association, and he in turn showed the cartoon to someone from Embassy Tobacco, the sponsors of the championship," Geoff explains. "They decided to commission 21 caricatures of current players, called them Embassy Snooker Celebrities, and sold hundreds of prints around the UK!"

Geoff was asked to provide additional sketches as new players appeared on the scene, but thought the fun was over when Embassy were forced to quit as the tournament's sponsors due to the ban on tobacco advertising.

"It's funny really - I'm actually very anti-smoking, yet I found myself working for a tobacco company all those years!" he comments with a grin. "Anyway, the BBC asked if I would keep doing the cartoons, but live in the studio!"

He admits that the prospect of interviewing the players as he draws is a somewhat nerve-wracking one, although he is certainly no stranger to celebrity - a long list of personalities from the worlds of sport and entertainment have already seen themselves gently lampooned in caricatures by TRIST (Geoff's alias), not to mention scores of "ordinary" people at functions and events where he is often booked to appear for the evening.

With his expert eye for the comic possibilities presented by people's mannerisms and faces, plus a distinct familiarity with the absurdities of life, it's perhaps not surprising that Geoff should have turned his attentions to comedy writing - in addition, his younger brother David Tristram is a well-known comedy playwright. "I didn't want to copy him too much, so I thought I'd do novels instead!"

Geoff's series of five stories following the life of the disaster-prone David Day are not strictly autobiographical, but he has used memorable situations and catastrophes from his own life and exaggerated them to further comic effect.

"They say you should write about what you know, and I know about growing up in this area - so David Day goes to Quarry Bank Junior School and then Tipton Grammar, just like I did," Geoff says, starting to giggle at the memory. "It was a real old-fashioned grammar school; we learned Latin and Greek, and the headmaster wore a mortar-board - can you imagine that, in the middle of Tipton!?"

Geoff's love of PG Wodehouse novels ("I'm a fanatic!") was one of the reasons behind his foray into writing. "Wodehouse was the godfather of UK comedy - without him we would never have had brilliant sitcoms like Fawlty Towers," he claims. "His stories all have that element of farce, and they're very complicated, to the point where you can barely remember who said what to whom! My stories are sort of 'working-class Wodehouse', set in council estates rather than stately homes, but with the same ridiculous situations and comedy of repetition."

In the first book, A Nasty Bump on the Head, David Day happens upon the body of the local toyshop owner, and much hilarity ensues as the situation escalates towards the utterly bizarre. Later books feature the discovery of an Egyptian tomb in Kinver, and a take on Hamlet based at Wolverhampton Art College, where David is again following in his creator's footsteps.

"My foundation year at Wolverhampton Art College was the best year of my life - it was considered one of the best art colleges in the country at the time," Geoff reflects. He studied illustration, which he describes as "the commercial brother of fine art." In fact, both branches have provided him with plenty of work, and Geoff's home showcases examples of classical landscapes, portraits and interiors.

One of these fine art pieces made it into the last 250 out of 10,000 entries in the Daily Mail's 'Not the Turner Prize' competition. Geoff explains: "The competition was for realistic painters rather than abstract - a very Daily Mail idea to promote 'proper' painting as opposed to the real Turner Prize!"

The entries were displayed in a London gallery, and Geoff's painting also received recognition from another source. "There was a TV series where a presenter visited galleries and talked about a different theme each week, and in the last programme he looked at the competition entries and particularly pointed out mine!" he says excitedly. "My old art teacher from Tipton Grammar phoned me up to tell me, but I'd missed it - typical!"

Another of Geoff's more traditional paintings has been a best-seller for Past Times, in the form of a 'mystery jigsaw' - the idea is to find all the words beginning with 'cat' within the ultra-detailed picture. Another similar piece is planned for this summer.

"I do manage to have several very different styles rather than just the one," Geoff muses. "Looking at the cartoons and then at the fine art stuff, you wouldn't really be able to tell that they were by the same artist. But with illustration, you do whatever you're told to do - if you're asked to draw a chicken in a gas mask, you don't ask questions! Whereas in fine art, you paint what you like and then try to sell it later."

The self-deprecating grin reappears as Geoff continues. "It's a bit of an identity crisis really - cartoonists are never seen as 'real' artists, while fine artists are never seen as potential cartoonists! But I'm happy to do a bit of everything... I'll even clean your chimney for a couple of hundred quid!"

A typical Geoff Tristram comment - but with his successes in art and now writing, it's unlikely that he will ever need to take-up chimney-cleaning as an alternative career!

See Geoff's website, www.geofftristram.co.uk, for more information and details of where to buy his books.