Some regexes that 'work' for this, the first is from the great free code syntax highlighter code2html.pl:

($text = $html) =~ s/<(\/|!)?[-.a-zA-Z0-9]*.*?>//g;
[download]

These are obvious (but too simple) solutions:

$text =~ s/<[^>]*>//gs; # only for most simple html!
$text =~ s/<([^>]|\n)*>//g; # multi-line comments?
[download]

For in-depth discussion consult Perl Cookbook Recipe 20.6 which recommends using the HTML::Parser and HTML::FormatText modules.