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Ken Follett is one of the world's most popular authors. His novels have sold over 140 million copies worldwide and he sells more books year-on-year than JK Rowling. But popularity alone was not enough, because Ken always wanted to be a star. In this documentary, he speaks candidly about how he achieved it. What gave him the edge, he says, was being Welsh. In this programme he comes back to his home town of Cardiff to reveal the forces which shaped his work. He returns, for the first time since he left in 1959, to the house in Canton where he grew up. He also revisits the offices of the South Wales Echo, where he got his first job as a cub reporter. You'd never guess it from the champagne lifestyle, but Ken's family were members of an austere religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren and as a child he was forbidden to watch television, listen to the radio or go to the cinema. His only window on the world was reading, and the focal point of his life was Canton library. His parents thought he was broadening his mind, and he was. But not in the way they were hoping. Because it was here that he discovered the James Bond novels and from then on, nothing was ever quite the same. For Ken, there has never been a conflict between his success and his left-wing politics. He's been labelled a champagne socialist, but in this film he describes with passion how his social conscience was awoken in the late 1960s by the war in Vietnam. The traumatic events of that time continue to reverberate through his work.