Sharpe's Challenge

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 British 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, is not based entirely on one of Cornwell's novels, but it uses and adapts some characters and storylines from Sharpe's Tiger (1997). Both are set in 1817, two years after Sharpe has retired as a farmer in Normandy, so chronologically they come after Sharpe's Assassin (1815) and before the final novel Sharpe's Devil (1820–21). Some of the events in the film are 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. Plot The film starts with a flashback to 1803 in India, where Sergeant Sharpe leads a patrol to an East India Company outpost. He arrives shortly before another supposedly friendly group of soldiers led by Major William Dodd. In a surprise attack, Dodd's men kill almost the entire garrison and make off with the payroll. However, Sharpe is only wounded and survives by playing dead. Fourteen years later, in 1817 after his wife Lucille died of fever, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Sharpe, now a farmer in France, is summoned to London by his former commander, the Duke of Wellington, 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.