"I'm a male stripper who won £70,000 on game shows - but I cheated on The Weakest Link"

A male stripper who won £70,000 on game shows has revealed how he 'blagged' his way to the final round of The Weakest Link - by colluding with contestants.

Mike Stratton, 55, pocketed tens of thousands of pounds in cash and prizes after getting onto 18 TV quizzes, including Bullseye, Decimate and Fear Factor. And after trying for a baby for eight years with wife Donna Stratton, 52, he even used £10,000 of his winning to pay for IVF treatment - helping him have three kids. But the crafty father has now divulged how he got down to the last two on The Weakest Link after persuading unsuspecting players not to vote him off.

Mike said before the show began filming, he followed individual contestants to the studio's toilets where they made ‘secret’ pacts not to evict each other. And he went on to speak to seven out of the nine participants without any of them realising they were part of his master plan.

Mike said several disgruntled contestants, who’d been culled from the quiz, noticed he’d stitched them up while waiting for the show to end in the green room. But when they complained to feared question master Anne Robinson, she dismissed their rage and told him that she ‘loved’ his cunning scheme.

Baring all, Mike confessed: “I cheated on The Weakest Link. Every time somebody left the room, I went with them. I’d say something like, ‘I tell you what, they’re going to vote me and you off straight away, aren’t they?’. So I said, ‘I won’t vote for you and you won’t vote for me, yeah?’ And I did that all day.

“By the time it came to film the show, there were only two people who I hadn’t done it to. My name never got mentioned until there were three of us left: Me, a girl, and this really clever guy. And I looked at the girl, and I said ‘Me and you in the final?’ and she said, ‘Yep,’ and we voted this guy off.

“One of the guys in the green room said, ‘You hear what he said then? He said before to me if I didn’t vote for him, he wouldn’t vote for me.’ Another said the same thing. They all went and complained to Anne Robinson about me. But she loved it. She came and gave me a hug and everything.

“You’re allowed to collude with other people, you see, there’s nothing against it in the rules. It’s just I did it with everybody, so everybody was annoyed with me.”

Mike said he first got ‘hooked’ on quizzes when his wife gave him a flyer for a game show called ‘Greed’, hosted by Jerry Springer, in 2001. The advert was sent to his family's sunbed shop in Wigan where he worked while also touring Europe with his male stripper troupe, called The X-men.

Mike said he used his charisma and unusual job title to get onto the programme and was shocked when he walked away with £10,000 during his short appearance. And that led him to start applying to more game shows where he felt he could turn a healthy profit in a matter of minutes.

He said: “I bought a new car for my wife with that money, and we went on holiday to Gran Canaria. And once I’d been on the one, I started applying for more. Because my job is quite interesting, I ran my own strip group, I just got on more and more."

The most money he's ever won was £15,000 on Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old?, where players answer primary school textbook questions in 2008. But the dad, who admits he's not a "general knowledge geek", said he has deliberately picked shows that aren't too difficult to win as part of his strategy.

Mike views his winnings as ‘treat money’ and has spent it on a variety of purchases, including laser eye surgery and IVF treatment that helped his wife fall pregnant. He and Donna had previously tried for eight years to have kids without success. But after he bought four rounds of the fertility treatment, between 2007 and 2011, he was able to have his daughter, Sophie, now 16, and twins, Alex and Daniel, now 11.

He has now written a book, which is available on Amazon, all about his experiences entitled ‘How to Get on Game Shows and Win £1000s’. And Mike said the key to bagging a spot on popular TV quizzes is to present yourself as an outgoing candidate.

He said: “What the game shows are looking for are people that are going to be lively on camera and not just give one-word answers. If you can be lively and entertaining all the better.”