The angle brackets ('<' & '>') are not regex metacharacters so need not be escaped. Choosing a different pattern delimiter would mean that nothing needs to be, making the pattern a little easier on the eye.

$ perl -E '
$text = q{asd<TAG>dsyuhf</TAG>urrh};
$item = $1 if $text =~ m{<TAG>([^<]+)</TAG>};
say $item;'
dsyuhf
$
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Note also that I capture ([^<]+) because (.*) is greedy.

$ perl -E '
$text = q{asd<TAG>dsyuhf</TAG>urrh<TAG>dsvnnhf</TAG>urubb};
$item = $1 if $text =~ m{<TAG>(.*)</TAG>};
say $item;'
dsyuhf</TAG>urrh<TAG>dsvnnhf
$
[download]

I hope this is useful.