Britain's oldest male stripper reflects on 38 year career- which started in Greater Manchester home town

Britain's oldest working male stripper has bared all about his 38 year career and vowed to carry on performing - at the age of 55. Mike Stratton began taking his kit off for money as a jobless teenager in 1986.

Over the years, he's performed a Full Monty dance routine at a woman's funeral, had to have a tetanus jab after being bitten on the bum and was even once booked by the Russian Mafia. And he has no plans to slow down as he is still wowing crowds with his incredible physique.

Mike, who now runs his own stripper agency, said: “You can’t beat going on stage. The adrenaline buzz you get is incredible. I think that’s kept me young. I call adrenaline a ‘youth drug’. If you met and talked to me, you wouldn’t think I was a 55-year-old man. In my head, I’m still 25 and I’ll do my best to act it.

“These days, when my agent phones me up and says ‘Do you want to do this birthday gram?’ I’ll ask ‘How old is she?’ If they’re under 25, I’ll say ‘Listen, that’s a bit young for me.’ But I’m all over the pensioners. They love me. To anybody over 50, I’m like catnip.”

Mike, from Wigan, Grtr. Manchester, said he’d got into stripping while searching for work just after leaving school. He came across an advert asking for male 'kiss-o-gram’ models and bagged the role after impressing his 'seedy looking' first boss when he was just 18.

He then spent nine months as an Ibiza party rep in the late 1980s before returning to the UK and going on to join the legendary Dreamboys troupe in London. During the late 1990s, he founded his own group called The X-men, with frenzied women going wild for the lads as they toured the UK and Europe.

And he recalled one specific incident in South Wales where one affectionate fan even bit him on the bottom. The dad-of-three, whose solo stage name is ‘The Hustler’, said: “I always said I wanted to be in Take That, but I ended up in the Dreamboys.

“Several times in the early days, when we were one of the only groups doing it in the country, we had to be rescued by doormen and ferried out the back exit. I was once stood there having a picture taken and all of a sudden I had this mad pain in my bum. Turned around and there was a girl on her knees. She’d bit my bum.

“She drew blood and I had to go and have a tetanus shot. I’ve still got scars on my back from where I’ve been scratched. I don’t know what is with women but they seem to want a piece of you.”

In his most bizarre booking, Mike and his troupe performed a Full Monty dance routine next to a woman's coffin in 2006. They were booked to fulfil the woman's last wish to re-enact the iconic dole queue routine from the cult classic film in front of 250 stunned mourners. After a smattering of applause, he says the raunchy dancers hot-tailed it out of the church and drove home in silence.

He said: “There’s a scene in The Full Monty where they do a Donna Summer ‘Hot Stuff’ routine. She put in her will that she wants a team of strippers to do this for her. At the church, I said to her son, ‘So everybody knows this is happening?’ He went, ‘Oh no, there’s only a couple of us who know.’ I said, 'You're joking!'

“People were crying, saying what a wonderful person she was. Then her son got up and said: ‘She had a great sense of humour, as you’re about to find out.' The music came on, and we had to walk up to the coffin - there were two of us on either side of it - and we did the routine.

“People were just looking at us gobsmacked, and we were like, ‘Oh my god’. We finished the routine and there was a ‘clap, clap, clap’, and we walked out. Normally, when we finish a show we’re all buzzing and chatting about it. But we all just sat there in silence on the motorway, driving home traumatized.”

However, Mike revealed he didn't just peak the interests of lusty female fans, but on occasion, sinister underworld groups as well. And he remembered how in 1996, his group were unwittingly booked to perform for prostitutes who worked for the Russian mafia.

He said: “We didn’t know - we just got a gig off an agent in this country. We turned up in St Petersburg, and we were doing the Friday and Saturday night - it was like ‘Ladies’ weekend’.

“The first night, we were backstage, and we were spying through the curtain. All these women were coming in dressed in 1950s Audrey Hepburn-style ball gowns. I was like ‘What’s going on here?’ We did the show. It was a little bit weird but alright. But turns out that all the girls worked for the mafia. They were 'ladies of the night'. We were there as a treat. When we came back, we told the agent off for letting us work for the mafia without us knowing.”

He’s written a book about his amazing exploits, which is available to buy it at Amazon. Mike is also working on a new tell-all memoir titled, 'My Life as a Male Stripper'.