Sparks will fly as a new 'Electric Wizard' reanimates 1890s show

• Walford Bodie performs one of his electric chair stunts on stage.

Now the electrical illusions of Scots magician Walford Bodie "MD" – who counted Harry Houdini as a close friend and a young Charlie Chaplin as an impersonator – are to be recreated for the first time in more than 60 years.

Calling himself "The Electrical Wizard Of The North," Bodie's act involved running electrical currents through his and his often nervous volunteers' bodies, recreating executions using a real electric chair he'd built himself and making showers of sparks fly from his fingers.

He also used his "Bodic Force", a mix of hypnotism, muscular manipulation and electric currents, to cure a variety of patients in a "bloodless surgery" technique that eventually saw him fall foul of the medical establishment.

But the show will be recreated this week by Tim Cockerill, a 26-year-old performer from Hull as part of a "Temple of Illusions" performance in a vintage touring tent once used by Bodie himself.

Cockerill says he intends to accurately reproduce some of Bodie's most mesmerising stunts – including making sparks fly from his fingertips, illuminating fluorescent tubes simply by touching them and letting 30 million volts of electricity pass through a brave female assistant.

But the electric chair trick has been judged as in too bad taste for a modern audience.

Cockerill, who will don a copy of Bodie's signature upturned moustache and a monocle for the performance, insists that the Aberdonian did not use harmless static electricity, as is widely thought, but mains power – as he will also. "If people don't believe us they can come and see for themselves," he said. They can examine equipment and bring their own fluorescent lightbulbs and we will light them up at our fingertips.

"Obviously we have got to deal with modern health and safety regulations, so we are using some modern techniques.

"But when you are working with this kind of thing you have to be prepared to take some personal risks. I will still be passing tens of thousands of volts through my assistant's body, making sparks fly and lighting electric bulbs through her fingers.

"I have reproduced things as faithfully as possible. People realise when they come and watch these things that they might be being fooled by 100-year-old illusions, but it's still just as effective."

The famous "Madame Electra" act is being revived in the tent in the Blackpool Winter Gardens, where Bodie performed up until his death at the age of 70 in 1939.

Professor Vanessa Toulmin, director of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield and a consultant on the recreation, said: "The electric act is a well-known part of magic and it is a principal act even now. The difference is Tim is doing it as Bodie would have done it in the 1890s," she said.

Bodie, born Samuel Murphy Bodie in Aberdeen in 1869, was at the turn of the century the highest paid music hall performer in Britain, making a reputed 300 a night.

He worked as a teenage apprentice electrician for a telephone company before launching a life on the stage, performing magic, illusions, hypnotism and ventriloquism. But he used the public fascination with the effects of electricity, then a novel, mysterious and frightening phenomenon, to make his name.

At the height of his career Bodie owned two hotels, a London nightclub, and a houseboat. He was so famous that Chaplin launched his own career by imitating him.

In 1906, Bodie built a family mansion, the Manor House, in Macduff in north-east Scotland and when his teenaged daughter died soon after he erected a lavish granite fountain as a memorial.

But when he branched into extravagant claims for electrical cures, he faced lawsuits and protests by medical students. Although some patients claimed they were successfully healed by this process – usually in front of thousands of paying audience members – Bodie was attacked and denounced by the medical profession which, on one occasion, led to a riot, during which police officers were injured.

Bodie later mischievously claimed that when he used the letters "MD" after his name he was not referring to being a qualified doctor, but that he was both a "Merrie Deveil" and "man of distinction".

By the end of his life Bodie's family had sold his Scottish mansion. His daughter Jeannie, his illusionist son Albert, and his first wife and long-time assistant "Princes Rubie" all died before him. His earnings had dwindled to just a few pounds per night.

The vintage tent in Blackpool will play host to what is a revival of Tom Norman's Travelling Palladium Show, a famous 1930s touring event in which the businessman gathered classic acts such as Koringa, the "female fakir" who walked on the heads of live alligators; Tommy Twinkle Toes Jacobsen, who played piano with his toes; as well as Bodie, the electrical wizard.

But Cockerill's assistant should beware. Most of Bodie's original equipment was lost in 1916 when the boat in which he was returning from an tour of India was torpedoed, which means the young magician has to piece the tricks together from archive material.

"Because it's an old act, no-one is around to tell us how he did it and what the original techniques are," said Cockerill.

"We can gather a lot from the eyewitness accounts, from the publicity material, and pictures. Everyone should be all right."

Oldest Sparky

For his stage act, Walford Bodie built a replica of the electric chair in which the first prisoner to be executed in this way, William Kemmler, was killed in 1890 in New York's Auburn Prison.

In 1920, 30 years after the execution, Bodie's great friend Harry Houdini purchased the original chair in which Kemmler had died.

The American escapologist and illusionist had already made a feature of an electric chair in a stunt for the successful film series The Master Mystery.

Houdini made a name for himself escaping from handcuffs and straitjackets, but had been forced to stage more dangerous and macabre stunts to distinguish himself from his many imitators.

These included the escape from a Chinese Water Torture Cell in which Houdini's feet would be locked in stocks, and he would be lowered upside-down into a tank filled with water.

Houdini also performed three variations on a "Buried Alive" stunt/escape. The first was near Santa Ana, California in 1917, and it almost cost Houdini his life.