Howard Jacobson: Go chasing rainbows by all means. But don't be surprised when disappointment sets in

Of the words we devalue by the hour, 'dream' is going down the pan quicker than most

From rags to riches, from obscurity to celebrity, from telesales and a TV talent competition to the West End - yes, a star is born. Just what we need. Another one.

I didn't watch Andrew Lloyd Webber auditioning Marias for his Palladium production of The Sound of Music. It had too many things against it. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Maria, the Palladium, and The Sound of Music, to name but a few. How does one solve a problem like Maria? Forgive me, but I did not put my mind to it. Of the Babel tower of problems waiting for solution in this vale of iniquity and tears, the problem of Maria, reader, is not up there with the big ones. And as for watching the programme for its entertainment value, eating my own feet would have been more fun.

Andrew Lloyd Webber works for you or he doesn't. Some people believe Martians have landed, or claim to hold discourse with the dead, or think Andrew Lloyd Webber has made our world a more mellifluous and therefore happier place. Live and let live, I say. Lock such people up but don't hang them.

Myself, I scan the queues outside Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (those he's written or those he's merely produced) with the sort of compassion that is normally reserved for the cold and starving. I feel I should distribute blankets and hot soup. And to each of them a zolpidem, the new miracle wake-up drug which rouses people in a persistent vegetative state from their comas. It would be a wonderful sight, the zombies of our musical-crazed culture suddenly coming to life in London's theatreland, throwing off their cerements like the newly risen in one of Stanley Spencer's resurrection paintings, and tearing up their tickets.

Snobbish of me? You bet. An all-singing, all-dancing West End does not denote theatrical good health. Not only does it threaten drama for grown-ups by grabbing all the clout, all the space, all the spending, all the notice and all the enthusiasm going, it is an evil of inconsequence in itself. You could argue that it's the proliferation that's the trouble, not the genre; that there are some musicals, taken in moderation, about which it would be over-solemn to have an opinion. Fine if you say so. I was a fan of musicals myself when I was 10. Bought the records, checked no one was home, closed the curtains, and let the music send my heart skidding from plangency to uplift. Mush met mush. But by 12 you are meant to be on to something else. Your voice deepens, your shoulders widen, hair starts appearing in your armpits, your testicles drop or your hips grow rounder, and you stop watching musicals. It's called puberty.

A star is born, anyway, whether we like it or not. Andrew Lloyd Webber's shrewd ruse of getting the BBC to pay for his pre-production publicity paid off handsomely. The public who had cast their vote for Connie Fisher on telly dutifully turned up to see whether she could cut the mustard at the Palladium; the critics - like so many 18th-century pastoralists meeting their first real shepherdess - fell for her "natural charm"; and now you'll be lucky if you can lay hands on a ticket before we host the Olympics.

I have no idea whether Connie Fisher merits this acclaim. "The people's nun" was how the critic Susannah Clapp reviewed her last week, which suggests she's giving the British public what it wants. But whether she's giving the British public what it needs is another matter. "Yes," declared the Daily Mail, just days after her starry debut, "dreams do come true!" And there's the problem. The dream stuff. As though we don't have enough of it already.

Of the words we devalue by the hour, "dream" is going down the pan quicker than most. "I have a dream," Martin Luther King declared, mixing the exalted language of Biblical prophecy with the lucid, optimistic cadences of the American Constitution. What he dreamed was freedom. That "one day on the red hills of Georgia ...", but you know what he dreamed. It was a dream in the sense that it was a hope, a yearning, an expectation fired by necessity and touched by fantasy, but above all an injunction - a dream whose power was such that we recognised our obligation to dream it with him. Now, a dream means nothing more than whatever it is you happen to covet. A dream house. A dream holiday. A dream date. In other words, no dream at all, just a hankering or fancy. A little something for yourself.

"Because you deserve it," the ad says. "Use every man after his desert," replies Hamlet, "and who shall 'scape whipping?" I'm with Hamlet. We deserve nothing. But try telling that to the legions of dreamers buoyed by the example of Connie Fisher into believing even more wildly than they did yesterday that wanting confers the right to receive. It doesn't help that the musical itself peddles this same empty democracy of want. "Climb ev'ry mountain, ford ev'ry stream, / Follow ev'ry rainbow, 'til you find your dream."

Reader, just picture what it must be like in the Palladium at night: all those vicariously palpitating hearts, all that wasted fancy rioting in unattainable futurity, all that emotional fording and climbing - what a cacophony of dreams! Don't get me wrong. I know what happens in theatres. Did I not want to be Mario Lanza? Did I not want to fold Jane Powell in my arms? Neither, however, was a dream. One was greed for fame and big breakfasts; the other was sexual desire in a light coating of schmaltz. In recognition of which, when it was over, I would crawl out of the theatre or cinema in shame.

No such compunction troubles the dreamer of today. When The X Factor hopefuls are asked to plead their case before the court of public opinion - "Tell us why we should give you our vote" - they invariably say how hungry they are for it, as though neediness is a talent in itself. In this, of course, they are encouraged by the programme's producers who have a vested interest in everybody dreaming vacantly of stardom; but the assumption that whoever follows a rainbow has an absolute right to find it is universal. This is what it is to dream.

We do not mean to be censorious. We admire ambition when it is yoked proportionately to a skill. And we understand that illusion is necessary to life. But the hour comes when you have to face that you're a telesales girl, and not Maria. And that you have to pick up the phone.