“I was straight out of the womb, put into a pillowcase and left on the doorstep… where is my history?”

They are the abandoned ones. Historically known as foundlings, these children were left, often within hours of birth, on doorsteps, or at train stations or bus shelters by mothers who could not cope.

Their mothers, in many instances young women who, for reasons of poverty, guilt and shame, left their babies for others to look after. But the child’s emotional needs often went untreated.

Now television series Long Lost Family, which airs a 90-minute Born Without Trace special tomorrow, is transforming the lives of babies abandoned at birth, revealing the loved ones they never even knew existed. And Nicky Campbell, who was himself adopted, says it’s taking those featured out of a “black hole” of isolation. He’s told The Sunday Post how the work of the programme is the most important he’s ever done.

“Long Lost Family is about people who have an emptiness in their lives and need to have questions answered,” said Nicky, 57, who hosts the special with Davina McCall this week.

Nicky says tracing the family of those abandoned at birth is the most moving. “With foundlings, it’s the difference between feeling an emptiness and your life being an absolute void,” he said. “It’s like a black hole in deep space.”

The programme uses the latest DNA technology and in-depth investigation to finally give answers to foundlings, often abandoned within their first days, or even hours, of their lives.

Three complex detective stories are told in the ITV documentary, including a man who was found as a newborn in a hospital car park in Portsmouth and a woman left at five days old in a cardboard box in Manchester. Increasingly freely available DNA samples are compared with samples taken from the foundlings.

“If we get to third and fourth cousins, then that’s where our amazing detective team take over,” explained Nicky. “We’re not just filling in the gaps in people’s lives, we are telling them about their entire beginnings.

“Just knowing is everything. When we do adoption stories, if someone sees their mother’s name on a birth certificate or finds any detail, that’s absolute gold dust. So to actually have come to the point where you know what happened… You’ll never know completely what was in your mother’s mind when she was a young girl in that situation, but you’ll know a million times more than you ever thought you would know.”

Nicky was adopted a few days after he was born in 1961 and his adoptive mum Sheila, now in her mid-90s, still lives in Edinburgh.

Although not a foundling, Nicky can imagine the extra significance felt by those who are.

“Many people who are adopted feel rejected,” said Nicky, who has four daughters with wife Tina.

“But while I don’t want to demean that sense of rejection, as I’ve felt it myself, can you imagine how you’d feel if you were a little baby put down somewhere and left?

“That’s a real psychological scar. To be able to be a part of something that’s attempting to heal those wounds, is amazing. I pinch myself every morning that we’ve made this programme.”

Bafta-winning Long Lost Family is one of ITV’s biggest hits and the forthcoming series will be the ninth.

And Nicky insists there is little prospect of it running out of either steam or stories.

“It’s like the Rubik’s Cube, there are a million different formations. So every story is completely different. There will always be estrangement, there will always be loss and longing and yearning.

“I think that’s the secret of its enduring appeal. It touches our hearts and we can all immediately understand how people feel and what they need.”

Nicky has worked regularly with adoption charities and says the impact of the programme can’t be underestimated.

“I’m doing a talk in Manchester for judges and social workers who do adoptions. And I was told that every time it’s on they get this most incredible spike in applications from people wanting to trace family members. I think it’s more than a TV programme. This is an important social thing for society because this is still happening. Just recently there was a days-old baby found in East London. It’s very hard to document but they think there may well be 14, 15, 16 cases a year. There are lots of reasons – culture, faith, family shame. Lots of different elements come into this in terms of societal attitudes, but not much has changed.”

Nicky, who also hosts BBC Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast Show, is due to head off for more far-flung filming but he’s been having treatment for kidney stones after being taken ill last month.

He was hospitalised hours before his show and then had to go back to A&E a second time a couple of days before he was due back on air.

“It was about 8 o’clock at night,” said Nicky. “I self-diagnosed immediately because I’d had kidney stones before 25 years ago.

“It was extraordinarily painful. I was rushed into Salford Royal Hospital and it does just remind you how amazingly efficient and professional our NHS is. I’ve got another big one looming that I’m trying to get zapped. There’s no way I’m getting on an aeroplane with the prospect of an eight-hour flight ahead of me and a kidney stone waiting to pop down my tubes.”

But he insists Long Lost Family is the pinnacle of his career and always something to relish.

“When I look back, it will be the most incredible thing I’ve been involved with. I think this is profoundly important. When I’m going filming having done the radio programme in the morning, I can’t tell you how good it is to do that after conducting a phone-in on Brexit.”

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Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace will be on ITV at 9pm tomorrow

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Alley’s Story

All the newspapers called me Little Miss Mystery. No wonder.

Alley Lofthouse was just hours old when she was left inside a pillowcase at a block of flats in Grangemouth in February 1967.

“I was straight out of the womb and put into a pillowcase and left on the doorstep… where is my history?” said Alley, who features on the new series of Long Lost Family after drawing a blank when she appeared on the series in 2015.

Alley said: “I was found by a paperboy called Hamish Brown. I was literally a brand new baby still covered in blood and mucus and my cord hadn’t been cut.”

Desperate to find out about her mother, Alley’s adoptive parents showed her press clippings from the newspapers at the time about her birth.

“She had a file of all the newspaper cuttings from the time and said she would help me but she didn’t have much to go on. In the headlines I was called Little Miss Mystery,”Alley said.

Alley had already discovered that she had a younger half-brother, Iain, who had also been abandoned as a baby.

Iain had been left in public toilets and eye witnesses saw a woman, who looked to be in her twenties wearing a helmet hat fashionable in the Sixties, walking in and out of the toilets at the time.

Despite the best efforts, including putting out an appeal, the programme failed to find her birth mother.

“It seemed like the end of the road,” said presenter Nicky Campbell. “It was desperately sad.”

But the DNA search finally uncovers Alley’s mum’s identity.

And while Alley is given the sad news that her mum had passed away in 2007, she’s told she has a half-sister Anne, who lives in Portsmouth. Nicky meets her and her mum’s past is a real shock to Anna.

“I can’t get my head round it,” said Anna. “When Alley was born I’d have been 10. We lived with my nana, my brother and sister, and she managed to hide it from everybody.”

Anna is happy to meet with Alley in an emotional encounter neither thought they would ever have.

“I think it’s incredibly moving because those ties, those blood bonds you never knew you had, come into play,” said Nicky.

“It’s wonderful. She just wanted to do it for the sister she never knew existed.”