Ginger, balding men - standup star Ray Bradshaw has the show for you - Doppelginger is coming to The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea

It’s been happening for years, so in his new show Doppelginger, Ray is using the latest in genetic research (the internet) to try and find the person who looks most like him.​

“I'm just going out and meeting bald, ginger people, which I never really thought was something I'd say!” Ray tells The News.

“The idea first came to me in 2016, when I was doing Melbourne Comedy Festival and a girl came up to me after the show and said, ‘What are you doing after the show?’ So I said, ‘Sorry, I've got a girlfriend’.

"She was like, ‘I'm not hitting on you’,” he adopts a withering tone, “so it was, ok... But she told me there was a ginger pride rally happening in town. I went along to it and there were about 600 ginger people – it was quite unsettling.”

Given the weather at the time, Ray recalls that this may not have been the best place to hold a gathering for people prone to burning as soon as they saw the sun.

“It was 32 degrees – it was brutal, people were dropping one by one, it was like The Hunger Games.

“But I thought there was a funny idea for a show in there, and it evolved.”

“I've been travelling around meeting people for this, and it's been ridiculous, if I'm honest. Do you ever have moments in your life, where you're like: ‘I can't believe I'm getting away with this?’ That's been my last four months.

“You get some people say we look so similar, but I think we don't look at all alike – just like someone's drawn a beard on an egg. We don't look like anything else!

He’s even set up a website – doppelginger.net for people to submit their suggestions.

"Doppelginger.com was like £600, I wasn't paying that! – very Scottish,” Ray is from Glasgow, “so that’s why it’s .net.

"I wake up now every morning to people sending me pictures to the website – I've got some amazing ones, some insulting ones. What's surprised me so much is how much people are on board with it. The minute people submit a picture, they want to meet up and they want to chat. It's been really good fun."

The week before we speak, Ray performed a gig to an audience entirely composed of has supposed doppelgangers.

"It's getting out of hand,” he laughs, “but it is getting surreal. Like I did a gig last week, only for bald, ginger people. There was about 20 in the audience, and the best way to describe it is those mirrors at the funfair that make you look fatter and thinner, taller, shorter – and that's what I was looking out into.”

So far he’s racked up lookalikes across Europe and up into Scandinavia, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and a handful in America and Canada, where he admits he doesn’t have much of a profile yet, “oh, and one from the entire continent of Asia...”

Ray’s tour will also be signed live by a BSL interpreter – something that’s important to the comic as both his parents are deaf.

"It's a big part of my identity – growing up with deaf parents, sign language was the first language I ever learned. My son's four, he's learning it, my wife learned it. It's a huge part of who I am and what made me.

"I've done two shows in sign language and I signed it all. It was great fun – seeing people who don't usually come to comedy shows was amazing.

"And there were huge numbers too, so it showed there are people who wanted to come, but it's not usually accessible to them. This time I didn't want to abandon it, but I'm having someone else sign it. It needs to be done for an audience who clearly want to enjoy comedy too. In a few venues, there will be interpreters who look like me, which is a double-tick!”

If you think you fit the bill, or know someone who does, Ray’s website is at doppelginger.net.

Doppelginger is at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, on Sunday, March 24, Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.