father and comic caused a stir at a local hotel yesterday when he sauntered into the lobby to meet the local media.

Bill Cosby joked with surprised guests and hotel staff as he signed autographs and posed for photographs with them.

"I'm sleeping and I'm going back to sleep after this,'' said the superstar, explaining his attire. "I'm making withdrawals from the Bermuda Sleeping Bank!'' The multi-millionaire also expressed his pleasure with the balmy weather. "I just left a foot and a half of snow in Massachusetts! I've got all the windows and doors of my room open,'' he said.

Cosby, admitting he is 56, says he intends to take it easy on his two-day visit on the Island, which he says is his 20th.

He is here to address the National Educational Conference Committee's black-tie banquet tonight where he will also do a comic routine.

After telling of his arrival in Bermuda via private jet with his agent at about 3 a.m. yesterday morning, Cosby cracks a joke at the fact Forbes and Fortune magazine have bumped him from the top of their highest paid entertainer lists to number three.

Cosby reportedly has net earnings of $57 million a year.

Although he has authored four best-selling books on parenting and holds a Ph.D in education, the most recent being Childhood, he makes it clear he does not intend to "step off a plane'' and tell Bermuda how to deal with its social problems.

But he did offer these words of advice: "If Bermuda cares about its people it will go in (drug areas) there and make sure drugs don't get in.

"It can all be cleared up so simply. Just go in and clean it all up.'' As for parenting, his 29 years experience told him this, "Hold your own philosophy and believe in yourself.'' He said Bermuda was probably like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, isolated tourist paradises where money flowed freely, "yet two blocks away are the projects''.

Cosby has no major projects in the works, his last being a reunion with Robert Culp to bring 1960s super-sleuth show I Spy back on the air for two hours. The show was the first dramatic series with a black co-star.

But Cosby insists he has no similar plans for a reunion of the Huxtable clan.

"There's no chance of it coming back,'' he said of the biggest TV hit of the 1980s, the Cosby Show.

"I'm retired and I'm tired,'' he said.

But the two people he will "never forget'', are Culp and Cosby co-star Phylicia Rashad.

"Bob and I knew each other 29 years and I never had an argument with him,'' he said. "I never had an argument with Phylicia either.'' However, he apparently did have arguments with Cosby scriptwriters.

"That was the only problem,'' he said. "The writing people couldn't deliver what I saw and wanted for the show. Sitcom writers really don't know how to deal with or make humour out of human behaviour.'' He took his hat off to TV bad girl Roseanne Arnold for her firm stance on scripts for her show, which is proving to be the biggest comedy hit of the 1990s.

"With the batch of writers I got, I can totally identify with her firing script people,'' he said.

One of the problems, he said, was most script writers had never done stand-up comedy, so they did not have a feel for what was funny.

"It's not fair to park me with a script that I couldn't laugh at and expect me to use it on the air,'' he said.

Today's workshops ($30 each) get underway at 10 a.m. at the Southampton Princess and feature a number of presentations by different youth, social and educational agencies, including Family Services, Probation Services, PARENTS, 100 Black Men, the Coalition for the Protection of Children, the Bermuda Reading Association.

The Bermuda National Education Conference Committee, headed by headmaster Mr.

Melvyn Bassett, flew Cosby in to highlight the conference for a cost of around $100,000. Tickets for the five-course banquet cost $125-a-head.

Bill Cosby.