Simple, clumsy, slow HTML tag stripper

def strip_HTML(s):
    """Simple, clumsy, slow HTML tag stripper"""
    result = ''
    total = 0
    for c in s:
        if c == '<':
            total = 1
        elif c == '>':
            total = 0
            result += ' '
        elif total == 0:
            result += c
    return result