Veteran British actor Richard Briers has announced that he's battling emphysema and admits: "The ciggies got me."
The 79-year-old conceded that his decades-long smoking habit - said to include up to 500,000 cigarettes - has left him with the debilitating lung disease.
He admitted to the Daily Mail that it was "too late" to fix and that "the ciggies got me".
"I've got emphysema, you see, so I'm b*****d," he added. "Five hundred thousand cigarettes, darling - that's the trouble. I haven't even got the strength to garden anymore."
The TV icon added: "It's totally my fault. So, I get very breathless, which is a pain in the backside. Trying to get upstairs, oh God, it's ridiculous. Of course, when you're bloody nearly 80 it's depressing because you've had it anyway.
"The ciggies got me. I stopped ten years ago but too late. If you do it in your thirties then you're okay, but after 30 it gets you.
"I was diagnosed five years ago and didn't think it would go quite as badly as it has. It's a b*****, but there it is. I used to love smoking."
Briers is best known for his starring role in the hugely successful 1970s' BBC One sitcom The Good Life as Tom Good opposite Felicity Kendal.
He has also starred in many other roles across TV, film, theatre and radio - including 1980s' sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles, 2000s' drama Monarch of the Glen and Kenneth Branagh's 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing.
