Hartley's Biscuits was a hundred and twenty years old. Everybody in Britain had eaten a Hartley's Digestive at some point. Usually dunked in tea.

But young people had stopped buying them. Sales were falling. Hartley's wanted a new advertising agency, and a new idea.

Graham asked Olivia and me to come up with one idea each. He'd choose the best one to pitch.

Olivia's idea was called Hartley's After Dark. Famous influencers on a yacht in Ibiza, eating biscuits at sunset. Very glossy. Very expensive.

“We need to make biscuits sexy,” she said.

My idea was called Made by Hands.

The Hartley's factory in Gateshead had been making biscuits since 1904. Six hundred people still worked there. Real people. Bakers, packers, engineers. Some families had worked there for four generations.

My dad was one of them. Ken Hughes. Thirty-one years on the Digestive line. I grew up with the smell of warm biscuits on his work jacket every night.

My idea was simple. Show the people. Their hands. Their stories. A hundred and twenty years of ordinary people making something good.

Graham read both ideas. Then he chose mine.

Olivia smiled and said, “Brilliant. Lovely. So… northern.”

But I saw her face when she thought nobody was looking.