In the late '00s, Turkey sought to break away from convention and to confound our expectations: in 2008 it was the turn of Turkey's leading Manic Street Preachers tribute act.

The first of our top 10 to really pull out the 'ethnic' card, employing it in a way not wholly dissimilar to Queen's "Mustapha". It's Nusrat Fateh Ali Disco. and there's a faint whiff of Octopussy about the place. The chorus is rather strong, heralded by a glitter-ball glissando, and the backing singers are dressed as if they just came off the set of a Monteverdi opera.

Sipping from the "Toxic" bottle, but cutting it with grog, Turkey's swansong shanty was complete with argonautic male backing dancers in capes and eye-makeup, reminding us that all the nice boys love a sailor. Turkey, we miss you.

Turkey gave us a somewhat Israeli entry in 1987: very up-beat and frenetic. In their white frilly jackets and fru-fru skirts they looked a bit like chickens, and their animated, almost vibrating performance made us worry for the state of their hearts. One wonders where they might've found the energy for a reprise had they won. Not that that was ever likely: the song was too interesting to win. In fact it came last on the night with nul points.

In the UK, 2003 is principally remembered as the year of Jemini. At the other end of the scoreboard that year came Turkey (their refusal to being used as a military corridor to Iraq doubtless playing no part at all in their success (Poland came 7th despite their participatory role in the invasion)). Turkey were Turkey: they gave us a deeply grooved chunk of delightfully sassy harem hip-hop pop-dance (like an Islamic Destiny's Child). It comes complete with a rap section during which our singer (who looks like Juliet Landau in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" vampire make-up) sounds like she comes from Luton. She's not in the finest of voice, but she's far from Jemini, and her gusto (and tit-jiggling) more than makes up for her shaky high notes. She's wearing a curious corset that looks like something a paratrooper might use, and this serves as an anchor for four large pink ribbons which the backing dancers (at first being fought off by our vocalist) eventually grab and employ in some sort of sadistic human May Pole dance. This assembly is later discarded, though not to any great revelatory end.

Turkey's entered the nightmare contest of 1991 with a particularly whacky and fun twist (almost a Yugoslavian entry in that respect). It's so adorably light and sweet, like a little lemon-drizzle bun. In fact, it's a bit like a sped up version of the Greek classic "Autostop". It's also at a high enough tempo that they're able to squeeze in about eleven more verses than everybody else.

In 1984 Turkey made a move towards convention (as much as Turkey can ever be conventional in a European sense), putting on nice blue sweaters and adopting a wholesome '50s Americana look. The verse has hints of eastern promise (not least Israel's "Khay" from last year) while the chorus is just "Voulez Vous".

Despite a Nirvana-ish start, Turkey's entry, "Düm Tek Tek" proved a reversion to their "type A" formula: a red-clad belly-dancer doing a harem-girl take on modern up-beat 'R&B'. It's all pleasantly feisty: a twitchy little verse and matching chorus joined at the hip by an out-of-control escalator of a bridge.

One of two woefully unjust nul-pointers from 1983. Increasingly one of the more dependable nations in our view, it was Turkey's turn in the dressing up box this year. After Switzerland's "Theatre", and Germany's "Cinema" in 1980, Turkey decided to raise the stakes and give us "Opera". Our vocalist, Çetin Alp, looks like John Travolta trying to do an Elvis impersonation. His backing vocalists are each dressed in random historical costume in an attempt to evoke the characters of the great operas. The song opens with an operatically delivered ascending harmony and then turns into a rather conventional pop ballad (I say conventional, nothing is conventional with Turkey: the verse is suitably minor and moody, and the lightly funky bridge is epically operatic in ambition) into which are dropped the names of famous opera composers. Indeed, if you saw the first and last minutes in isolation, having nipped to the toilet for the forty seconds in between, you'd think this was just another fairly decent Eurovision entry with nothing much of any real distinction. But rammed into that gap, quite incongruously, is the sort of madness that turns a song from alright to a work of genius. It comes, and then forty seconds later it is forgotten, such that you begin to question that it ever happened at all. For forty seconds, "Opera" turns into a wildly silly, bright, bouncy, charlstonable 1920s swing dance-band number, with the clippily delivered lyric "Opera! / Opera! / Opera! Opera! Opera!". It is a fine forty seconds and it is not an hallucination. One clarinetist nearly died to bring it to us.

There may be some shock that "Opera" didn't top this list, but the Dark Ages of Eurovision do hide one or two little delights, and we should ignore them at our peril. Our winner from 1989, and our favourite Turkish entry to date, was delivered with some fabulously energetic conduction from a man with a Frank Zappa moustache. This is Turkey at their ethnic best, and was about three parsecs ahead of the rest of the field in 1989 (which is why it came second-to-last). Two women and two men in counterpoint, it's bursting with middle eastern energy, utterly relentless and just plain wonderful. And when one learns that "Bana bana" means "to me, to me" it gives it a whole new dimension.