The Week In Radio: The Archers is a tale of country folk stands the test of time

As Alan Bennett said, you only have to eat a boiled egg at 90 and they think you deserve the Nobel Prize, and in radio too, being venerable often means getting away with less than the best. Radio can be ruthless – the digital stations 6 and 7 have barely begun and Mark Thompson is musing on their demise in a post-apocalyptic world where the licence fee is cut and a director- general's salary has to dip below the half-million mark. But there are some Methuselahs like The Archers, which remain untouchable. At 58 years and counting, the question is whether radio's favourite soap is having a senior moment or is it as fresh as ever?

The Archers is, of course, far more than a radio programme. Way before Second Life got going, there was the parallel online universe of The Archers, a place where your avatar can inhabit a fantasy land of websites, parodies, and message boards. You can invent your own storylines, meet other fans who are members of a special interest group – Christians, French people, cat-lovers – and participate in chatroom threads. There's a menopause thread going at the moment, not to mention chats on cancer, bible reading, alcohol, and birds. Yes, this might make you run screaming. But it's a whole world, The Archers, or at least more like a world than that one they made out of sand in Dubai, which now appears to be sinking.

You only get a world this real through minute, painstaking attention to detail. When the recent storyline demanded that Matt Crawford flee to Costa Rica, the producers actually recorded authentic Costa Rican birdsong, as well as church bells and rain. The details of Matt's subsequent trial and prison experience have been equally well researched. The other thing about being genuinely lifelike is that you get patches – years even – of incredibly dull bits. Storylines like the green burial site and the community shop that make your ears bleed with boredom. Yet nowhere has the use of real-time proved more beneficial than in the issue which comes to a head this week, of Jack Woolley's Alzheimer's. Where else would you be able to find a study of Alzheimer's that so authentically unravels, with all the slow, heart-sinking complications? Jack's eventual move into the Laurels this week comes after four years of progressive decline and confusion, which only recently escalated into episodes of violence. The issues of finding carers and coping with an increasingly aggressive and unpredictable person have been honestly and sensitively covered. This is a true public service and Arnold Peters' performance has been impeccable. I can see this may not sound like an accolade, but really, it is.

The passage of time is, of course, only subjective, according to Radio 4's fascinating Tempus Fugit, which explored the weird discrepancy between real and perceived time. Ian Peacock advanced the "perceptual theory", which argues that time is to do with the number of new experiences we have, so that children experiencing things for first time are taking in a massive amount of information that stretches time. For children, the simplest car journey seems to last for ever. As we get older, however, less new experience coupled with a process of desensitisation makes time speed up. Laboratory experiments now show us that the brain region involved in feelings is also involved in time perception, so in states of increased arousal, such as anger or empathy, time actually appears to slow down. This was an impressive attempt to unravel the neuroscience behind time and I'm sure there are some important messages in there for radio producers. The good news seems to be, you can actually make yourself feel like you are living longer simply by injecting novelty into your life. "Just brushing your teeth with your left hand gets you out of the neural ruts," as one cheerful scientist recommended.

Then again, who wants to live longer? Not Morrissey. "The world is quite dark and mad and everybody dies screaming," he pronounced in a memorable interview this week. Morrissey and Desert Island Discs – both venerable institutions – were obviously made for each other. Morrissey, who loves talking about himself, was seductive, mordant and flirtatious. He was also by some way the most miserable interviewee ever shipwrecked and is certainly not going to be brushing his teeth weirdly to prolong his existence. He revealed his plans for suicide, demanded a bag of sleeping pills as a luxury, and provided music to slash your wrists by. Kirsty Young, an avowed fan, handled him with aplomb. "Kirsty, do you know Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell?" he asked playfully. "You're not the first person to say that," she shot back, quick as a flash.