A little chanson number delivered by a stern and modern-looking woman. It's a little bit Lotte Lenya at times, with some interesting near-spoken moments.

Long before Jedward, Germany gave us the first identical twins of Eurovision in the form of Alice & Ellen Kessler. They gave us a swinging and highly choreographed Carry On routine, as they say hello to an awful lot of boys.

In 2021, Germany were not rising to the wiggling middle finger being waved in their direction by a dancing hand that dripped in pathos. Ah yes, What to make of this one? A proper Schrödinger humdinger, with chirpy Jendrik and his ukelele... Everything about it is simultaneously hatefully earnest and adorably kitsch. Or adorably earnest and hatefully kitsch. Certainly, Europe hated it (it came second bottom). For us, our brains just ceased to be able to process what they were being told, which is the sort of thing you can pay good money for down at the back of the laundrette, so we'll take whatever cut-price perplexity we can get.

A moody, skippy ballad with a persistent brass stab refrain and a very Italianate chorus, from the fantastically named Wyn Hoop.

Here's the first Ralph Siegel composition in our top ten. Our vocalist, Lou, is a woman no longer in the flower of her youth, but she doesn't let that get in her way. Resplendent in Muppet-Orange hair, she tells us about her antics "last night in the discotheque", and with the help of some young (and colourfully dressed) friends she met there she suggests that we get "happy" and "gay" to a pounding, uplifting night-club beat. The music is a perfect match for the title, never failing to raise a smile and a tapping toe. It's joyously decorated with little flourishes, descending minor chord sections, and chanted backing vocals. It's a perfectly formed little anthem.

Our top five could be in almost any order, really, depending on our mood. But we have to settle for something, and this is the way it fell, with our second of three Ralph Siegel numbers in our list. Hu! Ha! More Ottawan-style continental disco-pop, and the biggest raid of the dressing up box yet. A bravely asymmetrical lineup of five singers and a dancer perform a bouncing, energetic kung-fu tribute to everybody's favourite Mongol warlord. For the second year running, the German act seaw the removal of a cape, and as the dancer cavorts with the female vocalists one almost expects him to tear off their clothes (but it would take another two years for that sort of thing to enter Eurovision). Maniacal chortles abound.

Margot Hielscher's second appearance in Eurovision sees her don the mantle of Miss Juke Box, rotating her tiny stack of 45s while singing us through another run of what has proved to us to be a truly unforgettable chorus.

This gets off to a great start straight away, thanks to the employment of a genuine telegraph machine which sprinkles dots and dashes of morse throughout the piece. It's a great, slickly delivered song made all the better by the fascinating routine the singers perform with their arms. You'll be trying it with your friends if you've anything about you.

After a number of years in the wilderness, in 1994 Ralph Siegel recaptured his old form to deliver "Wir geben 'ne Party". The song was performed by MeKaDo, a sort of heavily '90s version of the Andrews Sisters. They are possessed of the one thing nobody else seems to have had in 1994, namely a pulse. They also have Wincey Willis on drums (not to mention one of 1977's Silver Convention on keyboards). With a dance-pop beat, orchestra hits, flourishing brass fills, and a bountifully joyous sense of fun, this is what a schlager rave must be like. Oh yeah. And that's before we've even reached the rap section. Excellent stuff, well paced, brilliantly choreographed and effortlessly performed.

Determined to recapture old form, in 1969 Germany got the magnificent Siw Malmkvist on a free transfer from Sweden, dressed her as a shrimp, and gave her an unforgettable slab of mind-scarringly repetitive schlager kitsch entitled "Primaballerina". It has driven us mad enough to put it first in this chart.