As the sub-titles imply, Happísland and Fantasviss are basically mirror-images of each other: in the first, the Swiss government, meeting secretly on the Rütli, has become concerned about Iceland overtaking it in an important "quality of life" index, and sends its top secret agent Hans-Üli Stauffacher to spend the year 2012 living undercover in Reykjavik. His monthly despatches to his controller (disguised as letters to his Mama) describe the weather and scenery, the strange things he is made to eat, and the advanced social security system; he tries to cope with the absence of cheese, public transport and vegetables, and he attends various local festivals.

In Fantasviss, it is a few years later, and Switzerland is creeping ahead again (after generous tax-advantages were granted by the federal government to the compiler of the "quality of life" index), so the Icelanders send out their top secret agent Sigurd Sig Sigurdsson ("Triple Sig") to check out the competition: he spends a month travelling around all twenty-six cantons (or, if you're pedantic, twenty cantons and six half-cantons) to discover the bizarre diversity of the Swiss, united only in their patriotic admiration of Roger Federer. He is puzzled by the scarcity of toponyms (most cantons seem to share a name with their main town and with the lake that it is on), by the complex inefficiencies of the health and education systems, the backwardness about women's rights, and so on, but impressed with the many interesting local dishes he gets to eat, the scenery, and the penknives. Asked to check up on the relevance of militarism to Switzerland's success, he learns that without soldiers the pubs would all be forced to close, and without army uniforms there would be no garment industry. He also discovers that the Swiss defeated the Burgundians in the fifteenth century by sneakily selling them penknives fitted with corkscrews...

The conclusion seems to be that the main advantage the Icelanders have over the Swiss is their low population density, whilst the Swiss profit from their more agreeable climate and their close links to the rest of Europe. We could probably have guessed that...

Entertaining, as far as it goes — they are only 45 minutes each on audio. ( )