Mrs Brady the Old Lady

Mrs Brady - Old Lady is a character in Viz who depicts a stereotypical image of an elderly woman. She is forgetful, unattentive, bigoted and constantly talking about her ailments while also referring to her youth and how life was so much better back then. Furthermore she is rude and spiteful. She doesn't seem to pay much attention to what is going on around her - when a friend of hers is dying she continues to talk about her own ailments - and often misunderstands what other people say to her. Her full name is Ada Florence Agnes Pankhurst Brady. She is a widow, her late husband being a man named Sidney, who she often talks about. However, in the Viz game 'Klepto' (in which she features in a first-person), one of the endings shows her seeing Sidney in a dream. He then states quite firmly that not only is he far from pleased to see her, but also that he is not even dead. He is actually living in Carlisle because he 'couldn't stand the old cow!'

She is often portrayed as being a hypocrite as in most episodes she complains about how immoral the modern world is and how values have gone down and then talks of happy memories of doing the same sort of things herself in her youth because "you had to in them days". She is a hypochondriac, and is particularly obsessed with her bowel movements. Like the character Student Grant, she repeatedly complains about her poverty, but is often seen spending (or dropping) lots of money, and even shoveling a huge pile of it into her basket from under her mattress!

Her speech is littered with archaic colloquialisms (for example, she uses "oxter" and "lisk" instead of "armpit" and "groin") and racist (or "racialist", as Mrs. Brady would say) phrases (for example, she'll talk of "being Jewed at the till"). In one strip she says of another woman "At least my daughter's not stepping out with a darkie".

She has two best friends; Dolly Earnshaw, and Ena, who are just like her - they are both old ladies who are bigoted and forgetful albeit not quite as mean. Dolly in particular is talking constantly about her illnesses. Both also have a frequent habit of repeating whatever Ada says, and then saying "Yes, that's right". Ada often mistreats her friends or takes advantage of them to suit her own ends. On one occasion she is seen taking an antique clock to a pawnbroker, saying that it belonged to her friend Dolly who had 'had a fall', implying that Dolly had died. She collects the money for the clock then returns to Dolly's house where Dolly remains in a crumpled heap in the hallway having fallen down the stairs but is nevertheless still very much alive and still waiting for Ada to phone for an ambulance.

Dolly and Ena almost always appear in a Mrs. Brady Old Lady strip, and both they and Mrs. Brady herself regularly have non-speaking cameo roles or appear as background characters in other Viz strips.