The mission to track down the parents of a Kent man abandoned outside a hospital as a newborn is set to appear on Long Lost Family tonight.

Jamie Duffy, who now lives in Maidstone, hit the headlines in 1988 when he was discovered by a group of schoolgirls wrapped in a towel and carrier bag in the car park of a hospital in Portsmouth.

The story of his past and the efforts of investigators to trace his birth mother to solve the mystery hanging over his life will hit television screens this evening in a special 90-minute episode of Long Lost Family, Born Without Trace.

At the time he was found, appeals to find Jamie's mother led to a woman calling a police hotline in tears, to say that she couldn’t look after him. A copy of the recording is all that 30-year-old has from the person he believes to be his mum.

Jamie was adopted two months later and at age 14 his parents told him the truth about his start in life. But his birth mother was never found.

"I recall having a conversation with my mum and it got a bit emotional because I just couldn’t grasp as to why someone would abandon a child at such a young age," said the father-of-two.

"Having been abandoned you feel that you’re not wanted, unloved, sort of discarded. There must be very strong circumstances to leave me. I want to know why it happened."

With the help painstaking detective work by the Long Lost Family team Jamie was put in touch with Marie, one of the school girls who found him.

Marie was just 11-years-old when she found Jamie as a baby. The two had an emotional reunion and visited the hospital to see the exact spot where she found him.

"We’d been out playing and it was on our way back home, we heard a small noise and the bag was moving," she said. "We thought it was kittens and pulled the front part of the carrier bag back and you were just looking up at us."

After a meticulous DNA investigation, specialists Julia Bell and Ariel Bruce managed to identify down not only Jamie's mother, but also his father - who Jamie last spoke to in a snatched phone call at six-years-old.

"Everything is still sinking in really slowly. I went into this hoping that I’d find my mum, not expecting to find my mum and my dad," he said. "It’s just mind-blowing and amazing. We don’t know how well she’s coped with it. I want to be able to forgive her and tell her that it’s alright. I’ve turned out to have a wonderful family of my own and the life that I have had has been wonderful."

Jamie's heart-rending story will be broadcast on ITV at 9pm alongside those of two other foundlings - Karen Waterton, a woman left at five days old in a cardboard box in Manchester, and Alley Lofthouse, abandoned on a doorstep in Scotland.