COVID becomes a soap opera February 1, 2021 â 9.00pm Save Normal text size Advertisement âI guess it had to happen,â says Jack Dikian of Mosman. âA store that specialises in soap products in Sydneyâs lower north shore is having a post COVID-19 sale. The timing seems slippery.â âI, too, remember the coloured plastic overlay (C8) used to âcolouriseâ black and white TVs,â writes Peter Crowfoot of Normanhurst. âOne of our neighbours had one, and spoke proudly of the one time when the picture on the screen coincided briefly with the colours on the overlay, ie, the green was grass and the blue was sky. Looking further back, when TV came to Australia in 1956, we were living in Taree and the local radio repair shop set up a TV in their window with a speaker outside. A large aerial was mounted on an impressive steel tower in the hope of receiving a signal from the Sydney transmitter. For a few weeks, crowds would gather outside the shop in the evening and try to guess who the vaguely perceived shadows were and what they were doing, the picture being 95 per cent âsnowâ.â