Alexandra Pigg and Peter Firth are married in real life.
Wording of Elaine's letter to Brezhnev, as seen on screen as she writes it: "Dear President Brezhnev, I know you must be a very busy man, but I dearly hope that you can find the time to help me. I recently met and fell in love with a young Russian sailor, Peter Mayakovsky. There seems to be no hope for us - my only chance of a happy future life is to be with him - but he is in Russia and I am here, we're so far apart. I am alone and desperately in love. I don't believe what they tell us about the Russian people and system, and I don't care. I just need to be with Peter again, he loves me, and I deeply love him, our love stretches over two continents. You're my last and only hope, the British authorities have done nothing to help me, so I leave my heart in your hands. I ask only to see him again and offer you the hand of friendship and sincerity from an ordinary Kirkby girl. Yours hopefully, Elaine Spencer."
The script was written in only two weeks and the film was shot in three weeks.
Peter and Sergei are from the Black Sea region, which would make them not Russian but Ukrainian. In 1984 most people both in and out of Russia assumed that Ukraine was and always would be part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that replaced it; the fact that within just six years the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc would collapse, Ukraine would become an independent country for three decades, and Russia would launch a full-scale war, a so-called "special military operation," to reconquer it would have been inconceivable.
Was produced on a very tight budget (£ 300,000) with cast and crew working under an agreement of deferred payment.