Bad grandmas are the new pop culture icons – and about time too | Sally Feldman

The feminists who demanded equal rights 50 years ago are revelling in another liberation, from the tired old woman' trope

Move over, femmes fatales, heartbreakers, wonder women and teenage rebels. There's a new screen heroine jostling for a place: the bad grandmother. A growing resistance to the tired grandma trope in popular culture as frail, lonely and hobbling is popping up in surprising places. And it's about time.

This week, the second film in David Walliams's Gangsta Granny franchise will come to the BBC, to the delight of thousands of children enthralled by the transformation of a Scrabble-playing, fussy old lady who smells of cabbage into an international jewel thief known as the Black Cat.