Annalogue Productions for Channel 4, 8 programmes, colour, sound, total duration: 65 mins, 1984
A Televisual diary which takes a disrespectful attitude to the festive season. We share the artist's provocative and entertaining thoughts, with digs at the establishment, politicians and yuletide conventions interspersed with items such as alternative Christmas recipes.

Commissioned by Channel 4 and made in collaboration with independent producer Anna Ridley, the Xmas Diary offers Breakwell's view of Christmas and marks his debut as TV chef and gourmet.

"The grisly bloody Christmas reality of the city covered in vomit" is just one of the seasonal tableaux presented through Ian Breakwell's Xmas Diary...
Each programme takes familiar images - the turkey, the office party, the Circus, the Queens speech - and refracts it through Breakwell's surrealist humour, his penchant for finding the marvellous and the profane in the everyday. The series builds to an attempt to recapture the genuinely festive occasion through its celebration of the "Monarchs of Misrule" - Screamin' Jay Hawkins to Tommy Cooper. But what is most gratifying about the series is that so much tv-time has been given to a practising artist.
Nick Kimberly, City Limits, December 1984.

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