How I tracked down my advertising doppelganger

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/tracked-down-doppelganger-stuart-heritage

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The London Underground is a nightmarish place at the best of times, full of dirt and dawdlers and manspreaders and mouthbreathers. You could write an entire encyclopaedia about all the awful things that happen along its lines, but you shouldn’t because everyone would go and deliberately suffocate themselves by the time they got to the entry about self-satisfied ukulele flashmobs.

Everyone knows how terrible the underground is. But, trust me, I have it worse than you. I have it worse than anyone. For me, the London Underground isn’t just a filthy subterranean transit system. It’s the location of my last six deep-set identity crises. Because, you see, the underground is where my doppelganger lives.

Perhaps you’ve seen him. He’s the star of a Santander advert that currently occupies about 50% of Transport for London’s total advertising real estate. In the advert, a man and a woman sit on a bus and read a tabloid newspaper together. The woman looks mildly amused by the whole situation. But the man? I have no idea what the man is doing because he looks identical to me and my entire nervous system involuntarily shuts down whenever I see him. I mean, he’s identical. Same grotty half-beard. Same burgeoning podge. Same almost-ginger sweep of problem hair. Same exact shirt, for crying out loud. It’s uncanny.

Everyone knows how terrible the underground is. But trust me: I have it worse than you

Now, my first thought upon seeing the advert was that I’d suddenly woken up in Minority Report times, and all commercials were now subliminally targeted to the individual need of the viewer. When I looked at the Santander advert I saw an image of myself sitting next to an attractive woman; but perhaps the little old lady standing next to me saw an image of herself surrounded by cats or flying a jet or whatever. I just accepted that this was how things were, and made a tacit pact never to watch any more Dolmio ads in case I ended up catching a glimpse of a dead-eyed, flap-mouthed puppet version of myself barking about tomatoes in an exaggerated foreign accent on TV.

But then the texts came. Other people started seeing the advert, and they all wanted to know why I was shilling my face for Santander. People were tweeting me pictures of it. My editors, I subsequently discovered, had been emailing the advert backwards and forwards between themselves for weeks. Stusander, they called it.

So, naturally, I began to doubt myself. Was it actually me? Had I met a Santander executive in a bar one night? Did he spike my drink with Rohypnol, drag me on to a bus and coerce me into gawping at a rubbish made-up newspaper for an advertising campaign? Or perhaps they’d broken into my house, stolen a strand of my hair and fired it into the sun to clone me, like the baddies in Superman IV. Were there hundreds of deformed prototype versions of me in a lab somewhere? At this stage, I simply didn’t know.

There was only one thing I could do. I needed to find out who this interloper was. I searched Twitter for the advert’s entirely meaningless and thoroughly depressing slogan – Commuters Keep On Commuting – and quickly discovered that the woman from the advert loved to tweet it. I put her name into Google, found her résumé and discovered who directed the TV version of the ad. I sent him a tweet, and he told me who my doppelganger was. And now here we are.

The bad news is that my doppelganger is definitely a separate person to me, which precludes me from suing Santander for stealing my likeness. And he’s also definitely a person, and not a robot sent back from the future to save humanity, crafted in the image of history’s most beloved X Factor liveblogger. He’s a person. He’s called Andrew. He’s an actor, he’s in a band and, according to his CV, he’s quite good at trampolining. And we don’t actually look that alike face-on. He’s a one-angle doppelganger. Shoulder to shoulder, you wouldn’t notice any similarity. But if we both happened to lean over and read your newspaper at the same time, you’d lose your goddamn mind.

Andrew and I have arranged to meet up next week, because clearly this needs to come to a head. We’re both quite disconcerted about how similar we look, and his girlfriend seems quite pleased that she’s got two boyfriends now. If there’s a downside to all this, it’s that we’re both massively overestimating the other’s fame. He’s already tried trading on my face for Glastonbury tickets, and I’m clearly angling for a job on that tabloid he’s reading.

I’m quite apprehensive about meeting him, because meeting a doppelganger is a little like going on a blind date with yourself. It could go either way. We might simultaneously attempt to kill and eat each other in order to become London’s premier scruffy-looking blond man. Or, you know, we might end up having a perfectly enjoyable – if massively disconcerting – drink together. So long as there’s some sort of closure to this weird ordeal, I don’t mind.

I’m still not going to watch any Dolmio adverts, though. You never know.