We’re on the final stretch of the National Final season, so your humble hosts at Laugh Laugh Please Please had to call for backup. While lives his best Japanese life, we were excited to have Ivana’s cousin Lea as our guest host to help us analyse this week’s new entries: the francophone Netherlands, the nostalgic Serb, the hallucinating Dane, the electronic Germans, and the poisonous Croat.

Lea was also in charge of bringing back one of our main topics from Season One, so we also took some time to discuss some of the countries that are no longer participating in Eurovision. Please enjoy it responsibly.

It’s a new week in the werk room and we’re still comfortably riding the Eurovision wave: the 2025 iceberg is still pretty shallow, we’re moving at a relatively safe speed, and our enthusiasm is still helping us push through the drama.

We have travelled back to Italy this week, as a certain Sanremo winner decided not to accept a ticket to Basel, so a lovely first alternate is taking his place. Couple more stops in our European voyage: a story of survival from Armenia, a nautical cruise from Iceland, and a tale of shook milk from Australia. Beware if you’re easily scandalised.

This week we also take a moment to reflect on the elephant no longer in the room, and to keep John’s memory alive, we’re flipping the script on Valentine’s day to bring you the most heart-breaking, soul-collapsing songs from the history of the contest. Listen at your own peril.

Hop aboard the Eurovision train, full steam ahead, for yet another weekly musical tour around Europe: from the 2025 revival of a Polish 90s diva, and the caffeinated love story of an Estonian exhibitionist, to the fiery determination of a Norwegian knight, and the dark looks of Lithuanian grunge, while waiting on an indecisive, heart-broken Italian deciding whether he’s taking the ride.

For a moment of amusement, The Common Linnet has reached maximum difficulty, so be quick to play while still on the tracks, because all of this can derail any moment now.