On TV: "Letter to Brezhnev"

1985's Letter to Brezhnev is one of those Film on Four titles that has rather fallen through the cracks in the years since its release, almost certainly because of the absence of an auteur name to tie it to; neither writer Frank Clarke nor director Chris Bernard matched its success again. If it has an organising principle, it's the city of Liverpool, seen first from an approaching cargo ship, then from the air, and then - finally, resolutely - at ground level. It's here we find latter-day Liver birds Margi Clarke and Alexandra Pigg - far pottier of mouth than Nerys Hughes and Polly James - striking out for a night on the town; a chance meeting with a pair of Soviet sailors (Peter Firth and Alfred Molina) allows them to dream of another life in another world. Some of the salt of its rough contemporary Rita, Sue and Bob Too blows in off the Mersey, but this is a sweeter film by nature: clock the sequence where Pigg and Firth first lock eyes across the dancefloor of a gaudy nightspot, a cherishably mundane meet-cute in less than promising surroundings. (It also seems crucial that when this foursome check into adjacent hotel rooms, the camera remains in the room where people are talking rather than fucking.) Yet it's not entirely fanciful. The context may have receded in the memory, but this is very much a Cold War movie, released only a year or so after the 'Pool's own Frankie Goes to Hollywood were warning of the threat of nuclear annihilation in "Two Tribes". It's rare to see a film from this period where the Russian characters aren't presented as a clear and present danger, and the quartet's conversations are clearly Clarke seeking to reassure Western audiences that living under Communism is no better or worse than living under Thatcherism. It's a story that could perhaps only have been told in a city with proud socialist roots.

That conversation is particularly good at revealing personality. The sailors are absolute sweethearts, the blue-eyed, dreamy Firth and silent, bear-like Molina seemingly happy to go along for the ride and cede the screen to their female co-stars. The film briefly made a localised star out of Margi Clarke, a platinum-blonde bombshell who represented a Northern extension of the Diana Dors/Babs Windsor tradition, armed with the withering sass to push back against any undue objectification; she's also very moving in the final airport sendoff, embodying an entire social class's unrealised hopes and dreams. Brookside graduate Pigg has a tendency towards underplaying, throwing her lines away in a manner that might have seemed like a limitation were it not so affecting. Her Elaine remains one of the few credible 'ordinary girls' in 1980s British cinema, which makes it a slight shame that she barely worked again after this. (Slight, because she did at least marry Firth in real-life in 2017, providing the film with the happy ending it couldn't quite find its way to at the time.) Bernard gives it an only perfunctory nocturnal style, but takes care to preserve Clarke's streak of island-nation yearning and melancholy, which you wouldn't get in an American one-wild-night movie: it's in the tacit understanding that a few fleeting hours of fun like these are all a lowly factory worker could hope for, and that even they're likely to become a distant memory by morning. Like a lot of Film on Four productions of this period, it's also an exceptionally vivid time capsule to reopen now. Students of the Liverpool bus network will be over the moon; there's a none-more-1985 soundtrack (The Redskins, A Certain Ratio, Bronski Beat's "Hit That Perfect Beat"); and - arguably most historical of all - the sight of a postman ex machina who arrives before anybody's got out of bed.

Letter to Brezhnev screens on BBC Two tomorrow night at 11.35pm, and will thereafter be available on the BBC iPlayer.