The image of educational TV was summed up by spoof science series Look Around You: basically men in white coats waffling about fractions, theories and discoveries to a cheery Moog soundtrack, while an audience watched under sufferance. But following its many achievements in making the high-brow accessible, BBC4 can now take credit for transforming educational programmes into smart, interesting and entertaining TV delights. It has already given us fascinating programmes about supposedly flat topics – such as The Beauty of Maps and The History of Maths – and last night came The Joy of Stats.

Given that I generally prefer to watch TV in a semi-vegetative state while eating the weight of my head in Minstrels, The Joy of Stats proved a revelation. Partly that was due to presenter Professor Hans Rosling, a Swedish statistical maverick whose voice grew more excitable whenever he said the word "data" (that happened quite a bit) and exuded boundless enthusiasm for the topic. "With statistics," he shouted, "we can make the data sing." Perhaps he meant zing: because it wasn't so much the statistics that blew my tiny little CSE Grade 2 brain, but the way in which they were presented. It was beautiful, as if David Fincher had been tasked with directing an episode of Newsnight.

Rosling is part of the infographics movement that has wrestled data from the hands of grey people whose imagination stretches no further than an Excel spreadsheet, and turned information into an artform. Other pioneers include David McCandless, whose wonderful graphics feature on The Guardian's own Data Store site. Rosling has his own software called Gapminder, where anyone can go and compare gross GDP to dental health, broadband take-up or hundreds of other bits of data. His patented moving bubble graphs were the highlight of the show – in one section the information appeared to be floating on a gigantic glass touchscreen.

By the end of the Joy of Stats I'd absorbed dozens of fascinating statistical titbits – the average person spends 24 years of their life asleep, Norfolk had the highest rates of bastardy in 19th century Britain, Belgium has double the number of car accidents as the UK. "If the story of the numbers is told by a beautiful and clever image, then everyone understands," Rosling told us. And I agree. The show demonstrated that dealing with data imaginatively could add another layer to watching TV.

I can think of no reason why similar techniques can be applied to other shows – why not strap everyone on Question Time up to a lie detector with the results displayed in real time on screen; use one of the Professor's bubble charts on Match of the Day instead of Alan Hansen's droning; or give Antiques Roadshow's Fiona Bruce a virtual graph demonstrating the perpetual disappointment of old stuff being worth less than you imagined?

Did you watch Joy of Stats? And if so what percentage of enjoyment did you get out of it? And after maths, space, time and the internet, what other brainy pursuit is ripe for a BBC4 documentary