DESPITE CENTURIES OF LEARNING and scientific inquiry there are certain questions that human beings are unable to answer. For example, who would buy an anorak in a petrol station? Who listens all the way through to the end of In Our Time presented by Melvyn Bragg? Why did Marty Hopkirk stop in the middle of the road at the beginning of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and allow himself to get run over when he could easily have made it to the other side?

Yet if you have ever listened to a record and wondered “who on earth likes that rubbish?”, I have an answer. Me. I like pop music of all kinds and my taste is sufficiently catholic (indeed, it’s the only thing Catholic about me) that I guarantee that I derive enjoyment from at least one song that drives you mad every time you hear it.

I used the word pop on purpose, incidentally, rather than talk with faux sophistication of rock. For the music I like best is direct, simple, melodic, commercial and immediate.

Naturally, therefore, I idolise the Beatles, because when it comes to pure pop there is no one better. More controversially, it is Paul McCartney, the master of the direct and simple tune, rather than John Lennon, who is my hero. And when McCartney this week decided to assert himself and describe songs such as Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby as composed by McCartney and Lennon rather than Lennon and McCartney, I was entirely on his side.

I understand his irritation at the way Lennon casually claimed other people’s work as his own, telling journalists that he’d written 70 per cent of the words of Eleanor Rigby when he’d contributed nothing. I understand too why McCartney might be angry at being told by the ludicrous Yoko Ono how to describe his compositions. Most of all, I can see why the crowning of Lennon by the critics as the greatest Beatle sends him round the bend.

This business of swapping the credits round is a tiny way, petty but certainly excusable, to put his point of view.

I haven’t always been so sympathetic to McCartney’s attempts to put the record straight. Over the past few years he has tried very hard to suggest that he, rather than Lennon, was the avant-garde Beatle. In extended interviews with Barry Miles for the book Many Years From Now, McCartney told of his years in London dabbling in drugs, experimenting with tape loops and sponsoring modern art while Lennon was spending his time vegetating in Weybridge.

I thought that this rather missed the point. McCartney was the greatest Beatle because he was the more conventional of the songwriting duo, not because he was the more avant garde.

It wasn’t because he dabbled in drugs that he was great, but because he wasn’t dragged down by them. Lennon became a heroin addict while McCartney kept his head about him. He was great because he was a control freak and a hard worker, because he knew how to look after money, because he wanted the Beatles to do bigger and better things. He was great not because he experimented with tape loops, but because he never allowed experimentation to distract him from making commercial pop.

Without McCartney’s bourgeois conventionality there would have been no Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, no Magical Mystery Tour, no Let it Be, no Abbey Road. Indeed, after the death of Brian Epstein, almost certainly no Beatles.

What holds for McCartney is true more broadly. When Mick Jagger accepted a knighthood some fans felt he should have turned it down. They, too, missed the point. Jagger succeeded not despite his hard-headed economics-student establishment instinct but because of it. His genius was not the rejection of middle-class society but knowing how to turn its desire for a little vicarious danger into money.

So many rock fans and critics regard commercialism and “selling out” as the deadliest pop sins. Yet “selling out” is the whole point of pop music.

Some of the greatest pop of all has been the most manufactured, cynical product. Motown music was composed by employees working office hours. They played cards when no one was looking, then rushed back to the piano when they heard Berry Gordy’s footsteps on the stairs. The results, produced over and over again, were fantastic.

I know it’s only big business but I like it, like it, yes, I do.

THE TENSION MOUNTS. There are just two weeks to go in the great Diet Coke “Win £100,000” competition. I drink industrial quantities of Diet Coke and I feel I must stand a good chance. So far, however, nothing. There are some consolation prizes. The company is giving away 1.5 million trials at a Cannons gym. I’m pretty disappointed that I haven’t even won one of those.

It’s not that I want the prize, which is pretty insulting anyway (You drinking Diet Coke, fattie? You’d better get yourself down the gym.) It’s more that if there are 1.5 million chances of winning and not one of them has fallen to me, it emphasises how little chance there is of winning the £100,000.

Still I go on. Human beings are eternally optimistic about probability. I remember some doctor estimating the chance of eating contaminated beef at 13 million to one and saying that beef was therefore safe. At the same time the national lottery (chance of winning, 14 million to one) was being advertised with the slogan “It Could be You”.