Writer and director Stephen Poliakoff on his family's unlikely experience of the Cold War - and how it inspired his new BBC drama, Summer of Rockets This article has an estimated read time of 11 minutes

Did you know your father had been suspected of being a Soviet spy? And of bugging Winston Churchill’s hearing aid?’

I casually answered my phone one day in 2007 to be greeted by an unknown voice asking me this startling question. It transpired that secret government documents had just been released by The National Archives under the 50-year rule, and journalists sifting through the material had uncovered the story. Needless to say I was astonished by the revelation. My father, who died in 1996, had never mentioned anything to me about this. In fact, I was almost certain he had been totally unaware that for a period in the 1950s he had become a subject of interest to the British secret service as a potential enemy of the state.

Alexander Poliakoff, my father, and Joseph, my grandfather, had in 1931 founded a company called Multitone, which made hearing aids, among other things, and one of their clients was Winston Churchill. During Churchill’s second premiership they would regularly visit 10 Downing Street to service his many different hearing aids. The fact that they were Russian (they had emigrated to the UK in 1924, when my father was a teenager) and had maintained links with the Soviet trade delegation aroused the suspicions of the secret service.