The Sun Always Shines on T.V.

Waaktaar wrote the song and recalled that Andrew Wickham's secretary felt it was a hit and convinced him to make room for it. The band recorded it while really sick with influenza, he said, with Furuholmen and Harket lying on camping beds in the studio with high fevers. The bassline was played on a Yamaha DX7, and the other sounds came from a PPG Wave, a Roland Juno-60 and sampled instruments, including an oboe played on a sampler.

Released in the UK on 16 December 1985, it went to number one for two weeks in January 1986, a higher place than Take On Me had reached. It also topped the Irish chart and reached number 20 in the United States. It has sold more than five million copies. Steve Barron directed the video, shot over three days in October 1985 at a church in Teddington, with a crowd of mannequins watching the band. It opens with an epilogue to the Take On Me video and won Best Editing and Best Cinematography at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards. AllMusic's Tim DiGravina wrote that it starts as a sad ballad and explodes into something much more.

a-ha played it at the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Concert, and a live version was the single from the 2003 album How Can I Sleep with Your Voice in My Head. U2 stated that it heavily influenced their song Beautiful Day, and Bono joined the two songs at a concert in Oslo in 2005. It has been covered by Diva (1994), Milk Inc (2003), Atrocity (2008), Nadja (2009) and Keiino (2023), among others.