KATHERINE MACALISTER asks an ex-beauty queen why she’s on the trail of those harvesting human locks

Victoria Melody doesn't stand still for a minute. Never conventional, always kookie and reliably hilarious, think of her as a funnier female version of Louis Theroux.

Her last show Major Tom was a massive success, chronicling her quest to get her dog Major Tom into Crufts and herself into the Miss UK finals which won her numerous awards and fans.

Now emerging with her new show about hair, yes you heard me right, the kind you find in hair extensions, Victoria found herself crossing the globe from Russia to India and back home to Brighton again following the 'hair harvesting trail'.

Hair Piece is more of a documentary than anything the former art performance student has ever done before. "My beauty queen days got me thinking. I had to have all this hair glued in and wanted to know where it came from. Apparently there is a trade in human hair so I went to investigate."

Her voyage in India studied her friend Neeharika's ritualistic Hindu head shaving to give thanks, a big contrast to the cold hearted, money dominated version she came across in Russia traders choose the hair from women and children who gather in rural villages and shopping centres in exchange for payment for their tresses.

'The Russians don't think it's weird, it's only us that do," Victoria says, while admitting that both journeys were 'a big culture shock'

Once home she contacted her cousin Beverley, "a beautiful ultra glam Northern girl with huge blonde hair extensions" and set her story against Neeharika's, eventually uniting the pair in the flesh.

Their show is therefore full of video footage and film. "Of course it's about more than hair, it's about ethics, economy, diverse cultures, and it's funny," she promises me, "so just come for a laugh if nothing else."

Victoria being Victoria, is already working on her next show already, this time in partnership with her dad who was told he had a terminal disease, only to find out later that he had been misdiagnosed, so the next format is about his funeral. "It's been good to collaborate with him and to get people talking about death and feel comfortable with the idea."

To get in the swing of things Victoria is therefore training to be a funeral director and about to embark on an embalming course, learn to be a pallbearer and drive a hearse driver. The show should be ready by 2017.

"I 'm OK with death because the final show of my art degree was partly set in a mortuary. But I still need to desensitise myself a bit. "

And how will it be working with her dad, an antiques dealer often viewed on TV? "He's a bit like Major Tom really, soporific, fat and smelly," she says screaming with laughter, "but it's going well."

So how is Major Tom? "He's well. We have rescued another Basset Hound whom we have named Colonel Mustard, or Mean Mr Mustard when he's grumpy," she laughs. "Mr Tom performed in over 160 shows though and we did two weeks in New York, a tour of Canada, Romania. It was very successful and then we decided to retire him, not that he ever did very much," she laughs.

As for Oxford, Victoria was once artist in residence for OVADA Art Gallery, living in Blackbird Leys. So what did she produce? I launched People Punt With Me, where I took single people punting and fed them strawberries as an alternative to the romantic version for couples and I filmed people venting their their habitual anger."

This then is the life Victoria was born to live, even her art teachers realised that. "I trained to be a sculptor but my teachers told me that while my ideas were really good, my sculpting was rally bad, so after that I concentrated on the performing side," she grins. "Because I do love an audience reaction, without it I find art rather unacknowledged."