visitors. There seems to be some general acceptance that there is not enough to do in the evening and that some visitors fail to return to Bermuda because they think it is dull.

There is some truth to that. However, a real part of the problem is that the hotels, especially the large hotels, have to accept responsibility for entertaining their guests. They are often reluctant to encourage guests to patronise events outside the hotels; therefore they have to provide in-house entertainment.

When visitors are told that there was a time when the Forty Thieves Club, the Princess Hotel, and even the Inverurie and the Bermudiana provided such international top name acts as Tom Jones, Bette Midler, The Supremes, Roy Castle, The Three Degrees, they react with surprise.

Then too, a good number of other hotels provided their guests with such local shows as Don Gibson's Holiday Island Review and such performers as The Talbot Brothers, Hubert Smith, Brian Butterfield, Kingsley Swan, The Esso Steel Band, Celeste Robinson and a host of others.

Compared with that, there is very little today. True, the pattern in entertainment changed, but that is not the total answer. The Princess hotels moved to "Las Vegas'' type shows without the spice. The rest began to wonder where the audience was.

Cost cutting seems to have hit local entertainment first. Hotels saw it as an area where they hoped the visitors would not notice the cuts. But there was a cumulative effect and before very long there was very little entertainment at all.

Because local entertainers were out of work, places were required to supply local back up for imported acts. That was expensive and some establishments made the decision to do without.

Smaller local establishments like pubs soon realised that if they put on local entertainers, they had very few local patrons. Imported entertainment often provided them with the resident non-Bermudian patrons who seem to make up a high percentage of those who go out in the evening.

Yet visitors to the hotels, especially North American visitors, often came looking for "island entertainment'' which was more and more scarce.

Bermudians may have been tired of "Yellow Bird'' but that was not necessarily true of visitors.

The result of this complex pattern has been very little entertainment because people are frightened they will not draw a crowd. No one wants to lose money but the result is visitors who find Bermuda dull.