Victoria Melody

'[1] The worlds she has explored so far include pigeon fancying, Northern soul dancing, beauty pageants, dog shows, funeral directing, stand up comedy and historical reenactment.

Writing in the Oxford Mail in June 2013, Katherine McAlister described Melody as 'a real-life Louis Theroux who gets her hands dirty....Earlier this year you could find Victoria spray-tanned and manicured in her attempt to become Mrs Glamour UK, as well as waking at 5am to begin her dog Major Tom's arduous training schedule in their bid to win Crufts, all of which culminates in her...show Major Tom.

[3] She first exhibited her work in Southampton, in two solo shows in which she combined film with live performance: All Fur Coat and No Knickers (a space, 2004) and Ventilation (Millais Gallery, 2005).

Melody then created her first theatre show, Northern Soul (2012), working with the director Ursula Martinez and the choreographer, Janine Fletcher of The Two Wrongies.

Melody celebrates the social oddities of these cultural institutions with a respectful tenderness that resonates with her own peculiarities as she relates her project-work to personal experiences of growing up as an ostracised figure – unpopular in schools and society, and sidelined to a certain extent at home.

It was called Major Tom, after her pet basset hound, who appeared on stage with her ('The dog is remarkably placid and never lets his hangdog expression slip.

)[6] The piece tells the story of Melody's attempt to win the title of Mrs Galaxy UK, while also entering Major Tom for Crufts.

Having simultaneously embarked on a project to turn herself into a beauty queen, Melody sets out to explore these issues – and presents her findings in this dramatised piece....Like Major Tom, she is prodded and primped; like her dog, she has to learn to walk the right way in the show-ring.

It's a neat parallel, and one that Melody plays with a mixture of inconsequential charm and sly knowingness in a piece that is both startlingly bonkers and utterly ordinary at the same time.

On the Warwick Arts Centre website, Melody explained how the work developed from the themes of Major Tom: 'During my reign as Mrs Brighton a hairdresser gave me real human hair extensions.

Donald Hutera, reviewing the show in The Times, wrote that Melody 'must rank as one of the most charming independent performance-makers in Britain — smart, warm, unpretentiously funny and informative, just like the piece itself....She interviews a forensic scientist, travels to India to go on a pilgrimage with a young woman keen to sell her own hair, and exposes the exploitative practices of rampant human hair traffic in Russia.

Ugly Chief was a collaboration with the director John Gordillo and her father, the antique dealer, Mike Melody, who regularly appears on daytime television programmes.

In her Guardian review, Lyn Gardner described it as 'a ridiculously enjoyable show, not least because the tension is always apparent between Victoria's desire to exert control and Mike's natural talent for chaos.

“You’re not going to like this,” Victoria tells the audience when Dad wrests charge of the second half, creating his dream funeral in which he is buried in a beer barrel in a barbecue pit with the mourners wearing Blackpool FC's tangerine strip, and a band playing his trad jazz favourites.

Just as we love the rest of this generous, funny show...'[12] In 2022, Brighton Festival commissioned Melody to create The Enthusiasts, in which audiences were "invited into two extraordinary communities for an intimate auditory experience.

Taking place at two secret locations across Brighton, these site-specific events uncover communities on the brink of change as their traditional methods clash with new ways of thinking.

The structure of the show is also a clever expression of Melody’s joyfully chaotic brain, skittering between images, ideas and the sort of unwieldy props that her comedy instructor discourages.

"[16] At the end of Headset, Melody announced that she had begun a new project, embedding herself as a musketeer in the Marquess of Winchester's Regiment, an English Civil War re-enactment society.

Locally grown food, cooked by the re-enactors over fires, was served and Mark Thomas and the Brighton Folk Choir led a mass singalong of the Diggers' Song.