Tuesday Topic, with Christine Rutter

THE Full Monty, a film about a group of Sheffield male strippers is taking the cinemas by storm, proving that raunchy entertainment for women is as popular as ever. So I decided to control my blushes and investigate the subject by speaking to one of East Lancashire's top male strippers - with his clothes on!

I DIALLED the number and heard someone pick up the telephone receiver but no voice greeted my call.

After a long pause I whispered "hello."

"Ha, ha, ha. That got you," said the voice. "I'm a comedian as well as a stripper."

Probably not his most successful joke, but stripper Simon Richards, 29, was trying his best to prove that he hadn't just got brawn and good looks on his side.

"You can be a fantastic dancer, have a fantastic body but at the end of the day you have to have a shining personality," he said. "You have to smile and laugh and make the audience warm to you.

"Stripping is all about stage presence. My dad has a waist as big as his chest but if he had the personality he would be able to strip on stage and it would be a success."

And judging from the recent box office smash The Full Monty - in which a group of fairly undesirable, unemployed steel workers make a success of stripping to make ends meet - Simon could have a point.

"I thought the film was funny and it did show that fairly ordinary guys can get up and strip," he said.

But Simon is not any ordinary guy. He has a dark cascade of curly hair, a 44 inch chest and 16 inch biceps. He is most women's dream date - but he is a one-woman man. "You could have all the girls you wanted if you fancied that but I'm just not interested. I'm happy with my girlfriend. She gets a buzz watching me perform. It would be impossible if she got jealous," said father-of-two Simon.

But that does not prevent his barefaced cheek by going "the full monty" in his sizzling shows, like the steelworkers in the movie who strip everything off.

"I love taking off my clothes off," he said. "I've no problem with nudity. I have nothing to be ashamed of."

From the first time Simon swapped stacking shelves for shedding clothes, he has gone all the way.

"About 95 per cent of the pubs and clubs in East Lancashire where I perform want me to strip everything off," he said. "I was nervous for about the first five or six times but then you get over it.

"You do get comments from jealous , narrow-minded people but you just learn to ignore it."

Simon performs two 20-minute strip sessions a night - the equivalent of just over three hours of work a week, which could earn him as much as £2,000.

But his job description is a daunting one - cavorting in front of as many as 800 screaming, often intoxicated, women.

"Many of the women are drunk and just out for a good time," he said. "You can't go wrong really with the atmosphere. On stage I'm an extrovert and I get a natural buzz from my work." But off stage he is a sensible and quiet man who prefers a pizza and the a trip to the cinema to a night on the town.

"I'm a completely different person off stage," he said. "I'm fairly reserved and very sensible with my money."

Weight-trainer Simon, who started his stripping career as a kissogram, is also part of the male review team Xtreme, a three-man troupe who liken themselves to the Chippendales.

He said: "I get mixed reactions. I tend to get more interest from the men. They are intrigued by the job. You have to like what you do. My family are OK about it as well. They are broad-minded."

Which is probably why Simon heaps scorn on anyone with an anti-stripping axe to grind. He hits out at people who revolt against what they view as the dark, sleazy underworld of stripping.

But though we may see Simon - who comes from Manchester - as a stripper, he sees himself as a businessman.

"It's just a job," he said. "People who say we are bimbos selling our bodies for sex are narrow-minded, prudish people and should wake up. These people who have never lived. I don't think it is degrading. It is just all-round entertainment."

But whatever you think about the wholesomeness of such entertainment, this kind of beefcake nudity sends women in their thousands wild with excitement. Margo Grimshaw, who brought the first male stripper to East Lancashire in the 1970s, said: "He was called Zulu and he was a beautiful black guy. It was a massive success. We had a mixed audience of men and women. He never showed his entire nakedness. He was just suggestive.

"Women find male strippers more amusing than arousing but men are after the sexual thing."

Sheila Hindle, who watched the male review group The Untouchables at an Accrington Lionesses event, said: "Sportsmen's dinners have had strippers for years, so we thought: 'Why can't the women?' They were a bit raunchy but didn't strip completely. It was nothing serious. It was just a laugh."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.