Once a day, until Dec. 25, we'll be highlighting a specific small, good thing that happened in popular culture this year. And we do mean small: a moment or image from a film or TV show, a panel from a comic, a brief exchange from a podcast, or a passage from a book.
Last summer, Sweden hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. (It's tradition for the previous year's winner to do the honors.)
Presenters Petra Mede and Mans Zelmerlow kept things light and moving, and the show (broadcast for the first time in the US, on Logo) proved satisfyingly bananapants.
At about the show's midpoint, however, the proceedings went from their baseline ridiculous to lovingly sublime, as Mede and Zelmerlow launched into a musical number of their own that purported to be a scientifically-tested tutorial on exactly what it takes to win the beloved, bewildering contest.
It was knowing and funny and featured many past winners and contestants in winking cameos. It involved flaming pianos and acrobats in hamster wheels and a Russian man on skates and old ladies baking bread and shirtless drummers. Also, it was catchy as hell.
It was called, perhaps inevitably, "Love, Love, Peace, Peace."
And it was gift to the damn world, is what.
Previous Pop Culture Advent Calendar Entries
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
