One thing I remember quite distinctly from my childhood was the fact that you could move, televisually-wise at least, for TV series where an animal was the eponymous lead.
Flipper, Lassie and a host of others including, of course Gentle Ben, gave us whimsically sweet and warm stories where all the conflict and tension of the first half of the 20-25-minute episodes would be neatly and happily resolved by the second half.
It was escapist TV for kids at its best and when you were having a tough time of it as a kid, as I was with incessant bullying with no end in sight and not even a skerrick of justice for the perpetrators on the horizon, being able to lose yourself in a show where bad people realised the error of their ways and the central characters had their actions vindicated was good for the soul.
Watching the first two episodes of the 1960s TV show Gentle Ben, which followed straight on from the 1967 film of the same name – both were produced by Ivan Tors (Flipper, Daktari) and filmed at his production facilities near Miami, Florida – and which were in turn based on the 1965 novel by Walt Morey, you do get the requisite sense that everything is going to be okay in the end each and every time.
Formulaic? Absolutely. Possessed of a some troubling narrative elements (low key misogyny, animals chained up)? Yup. Watching it again as an adult reminds you that the 1960s were a whole other time and not always a good one.
To be honest it’s hard to ignore them as an adult, especially when Tom Wedloe (Dennis Weaver) the father of the lead character, Mark (Clint Howard, younger brother of Ron, who along with their dad, Rance Howard, a writer for Gentle Ben, also appeared in the show) casually remarks to his loving wife Ellen (Beth Brickell), during a playful exchange whether she’d like a “fat lip”.
Perhaps it’s an overreaction but it does shake you out of your nostalgic reverie, as does the fact that Ben (Bruno the Bear) is chained up more often than not, and also yelled at a lot by Mark who seems to love the bear and defend to the many strangers in quite a few episodes who react to him as a threat at first which, to be fair, seems quite evolutionarily sensible.
So, it’s unlikely that Gentle Ben will go back to being a sizeable part of my ongoing viewing schedule, if at all, but like any rewatch of a childhood show, it’s (a) interesting to see how you react to it now, some five decades or slightly more after you watched it, and (b) to remember that, for all its modern-day low key disturbing elements, that this show brought me all kinds of comfort as a kid.
It wrapped me in a cocoon of love and community and family and reminded me that justice could be served and things could be better, even if it only happened in TV, and at the time, that was far better than nothing in a world where a giant bear as my best friend might have come hugely in handy.