One possible way, shown in Perl CookBook (1st ed.), problem 20.6, is:

  use HTML::Parse;
  use HTML::FormatText;

  $plain_text = HTML::FormatText->new->format(parse_html($html_text));
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(I thought there was a function in LWP::Simple that would just return the text, but I can't recall for sure.)

Hope this helps.