Fame is the Spur, My Son, My Son & A Sunset Touch: Three Full-Cast BBC Radio Dramatisations

A trio of full-cast adaptations of the novels of Howard Spring, including his two best-selling works and featuring a 40-year-old Ian McKellen.

Howard Spring was a Welsh author who was an immensely popular and successful writer from the 1940s to the 1960s. From 1934 he produced a series of best-selling novels, the most successful of which were My Son My Son and Fame is the Spur. This collection includes dramatisations of both of these novels, alongside a dramatisation of A Sunset Touch.

Fame Is the Spur: Ian McKellen stars in the story of John Shawcross - from his working-class boyhood on the streets of Ancoats, Manchester to his pursuit of power and fame. He becomes a socialist activist and soon a career politician, who eventually is absorbed by the upper classes he had begun by combating.

My Son, My Son: The powerful story of two hard-driven men - one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur - and of their sons, in whom are invested all their fathers' hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O'Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers' lofty plans have unexpected consequences.

A Sunset Touch: It's 1945 and an unexpected legacy means Roger Menheniot can fulfil his long-held dream and buy back the crumbling family seat in Cornwall. But real life is to prove messier than idealised fantasy, especially where women are concerned.