The Lesser of two Tragedies

I was surfing channels in the afternoon and landed up on BBC Entertainment playing reruns of an old sitcom from the late nineties, I think. What intrigued me was the sight of a very young Benedict Cumberbatch playing a character called Peter Powell as a more-or-less milquetoast preppie trying very hard to be cool with a group of similarly wannabe friends in what looked like the Brit version of a honkytonk bar. In the scene I landed in the middle of, Peter eyes the young bartender, a sassy lanky leggy brunette with a throaty laugh, downs a pint of beer for Dutch courage, walks up to the bar and asks her to make him a cocktail of her choice, she raises an eyebrow and mixes one called Tequila Tragedy. And in what is definitely not the smoothest move in the book, he proceeds to offer up the glass to her and says, "Actually, I just wanted to buy you a drink. What's your name?"

And in true Brit tv tradition as a friend informs me, the bartender turns out be a no-nonsense Aussie gal who flatly turns Peter down. "Well, atleast, tell me your name. Come on!" he pleads.

"I'm Fee." She replies shortly, turning to another customer.

"What, like Fiona?" Peter persists.

Fee rounds on him looking rather pissed off, "It's Ophelia, if you must know! Ophelia Scherbatsky."

'That's an interesting name. I like it." Peter smiles at her.

"Well, I hate it! I hate it because any girl would hate being named after the two most tragic women in all of literature." says Fee with an air of finality.

"Yeah," replies Peter, desperately trying to prevent her from jettisoning the conversation, "Yeah, Ophelia is rather tragic. Losing her mind and getting dumped by Hamlet and drowning and all that. But Kitty Scherbatsky wasn't tragic. She and Levin lived happily ever after, right?"

Fee shakes her head vigorously. "Kitty Scherbatsky went from being a free-spirited, independent young woman with a mind of her own to being married to some hypocritical, monkish country farmer who cheated on her with Anna Karenina and she had to take him back and spend the rest of her life with him because Russian law in those days wouldn't permit her to divorce him! I think hers is the sadder story. I mean, I know I'd rather drown!"

Deflated but not dejected, Peter nods lamely and adds, "Yeah, drowning does sound like the lesser tragedy when you put it like that. Erm, it was nice meeting you, Fee!" and walks back to his friends, making up his mind to have a longer conversation with Fee the next night.

Watching this led to exactly two revelations - that Robin Scherbatsky from How I Met Your Mother is not the first sassy female television character to bear that last name and that only the BBC could possibly produce a Friends-style sitcom that has characters discussing the fates of women from world literature in a honkytonk bar over a glass of tequila!