Sharpe's Challenge

Sharpe's Challenge
British DVD cover
Based on	The Sharpe stories by Bernard Cornwell
Written by	Russell Lewis (screenplay)
Directed by	Tom Clegg
Starring	Sean Bean Daragh O'Malley Toby Stephens Padma Lakshmi Aurélien Recoing Lucy Brown
Theme music composer	Dominic Muldowney John Tams
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of episodes	2
Production
Producer(s)	Malcolm Craddock Muir Sutherland
Running time	138 minutes (2 x 90 minutes minus adverts)
Release
Original network	ITV1
Original release	2006
Chronology
Preceded by	Sharpe's Waterloo
Followed by	Sharpe's Peril

Sharpe's Challenge is a British TV film from 2006, usually shown in two parts, which is part of an ITV series based on Bernard Cornwell's historical fiction novels about the English soldier Richard Sharpe during the Napoleonic Wars. Contrary to most parts of the TV series, Sharpe's Challenge, as well as the follow-up Sharpe's Peril, isn't based entirely on one of Cornwell's novels, but it uses and adapts some characters and storylines from Sharpe's Tiger. Both are set in 1817, two years after Sharpe has retired as a farmer in Normandy, so chronologically they come after Sharpe's Waterloo (1815) and before the final novel Sharpe's Devil (1820–21). Some of the events in the film are, however, inspired by events in the first three novels of the series. In Sharpe's Challenge and Sharpe's Peril, Sharpe and his comrade in arms, Patrick Harper, have been temporarily called out of retirement and asked to go to India.

The film starts with a flashback to 1803 in India, where Sergeant Sharpe (Sean Bean) leads a patrol to an East India Company outpost. He arrives shortly before another supposedly friendly group of soldiers led by Major William Dodd (Toby Stephens). In a treacherous surprise attack, Dodd's men kill the entire garrison, leaving no witnesses, and makes off with the payroll. However, Sharpe is only wounded and manages to survive by pretending to be dead.

Fourteen years later, in 1817, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Sharpe, now a farmer in France, is summoned by his former commander, the Duke of Wellington (Hugh Fraser), to his London home, Apsley House, and asked to undertake one more mission for him: to find a man in India. The missing agent was trying to learn the identity of a turncoat officer advising a rebellious Maratha rajah. Sharpe refuses, unwilling to press his luck any further, until he learns that the agent is his old comrade in arms and best friend, Patrick Harper (Daragh O'Malley).