NOTORIOUS Lancaster stripogram king Brian Grove looks set to close his famous Crazy Girls agency -- because he can't find enough strippers.

If a last ditch recruitment drive fails, the company's stormy nine year history will end in just a few weeks, with Grove planning to concentrate on his internet porn empire.

The agency, run out of a house on Rylands Road, hit national headlines when a Lancashire police officer was sacked after an incident with a stripper at a headquarters party.

He was later reinstated by the Home Secretary after a 12-month appeal battle.

Grove himself spent a month behind bars after he was convicted of running a brothel after complaints by former models. He claims he then became the subject of a vendetta by Lancashire Police after he threatened to expose the illegal activities of certain officer.

Grove said: "For the first time in ages I haven't got enough girls to make it viable, so I'll be concentrating on the internet. Its ironic, really, because we've got more work than we know what to do with.

"Only at our previous busiest point have we ever had so many bookings."

Grove fears that negative publicity, especially at the previously rich recruiting ground of Lancaster University, has cost him dear, and pushed students toward other massage and stripogram agencies where prostitution, he claims, is actively encouraged.

But, he says, his critics only spurred him on: "If it hadn't been for all the flack, we'd probably have closed down three years ago.

"The Inland Revenue had selected us at random for one of their regular investigations.

"I went through the accounts in more details than I would have done previously, and it seemed that the studio and stripogram services were unviable.

"I only kept it going to give Lancashire Police a bloody nose. I didn't want to let certain people think that they had won."

Grove has already had to turn down the chance to appear in a TV series and will also miss out on work in Geneva and Tenerife this summer.

But his highly successful websites, for which he already has several years' worth of material, will keep the Crazy Girls business going.