Sentimental ... Planet Earth. Photograph: Stephen Cooter/BBC

It ought to be a return to the event TV of our youth, to Sunday nights curled up in front of the TV, in warm, familial celebration of everything that is wondrous about the natural world, David Attenborough, and paying the licence fee. But every episode of the BBC's Planet Earth makes me more and more angry. It's not the super wide-angle shots of caribou on the tundra, or the microscopic close ups of parasitic fungi in the rainforest; neither is it just the patent lack of anything that might be called scientific enquiry, the way that every sequence of each animal we see is totally decontextualised to become a sort of visual enviro-porn, with barely any consideration of the devastating way that man is systemically destroying habitats across the globe. No - it's the music, the oleaginous orchestral soundtrack, composed by George Fenton, that is glooped over nearly every sequence in each film, from Arctic glaciers to Tibetan foxes.

It's probably not all Fenton's fault, since the producers must have asked him to provide a nearly endless stream of grandiose orchestral swoops and swells to accompany everything from penguins crossing the Antarctic to a tribe of chimpanzees cannibalising a member of a rival group.

The problem with this continual underscore is that it Disneyfies the often brutal sequences captured on film. Instead of confronting us with the horror of an elephant being hunted down and butchered alive by a pride of African lions - footage that would surely have been better left alone with the grunts and gnawing of the lions, and squealing of their gigantic quarry - the music sanitises the film, making it safe, like something from a Hollywood movie.

It's as if nature only exists for us to make a film about, to fit into human narrative patterns. Fenton's music, in all its opulent glory, de-natures nature, reducing the wonder of what we're seeing by making it comforting and palatable to our saccharine tastes. It's all a world away from what Attenborough did in Life on Earth and his earlier TV series, where the whole project was to reveal the natural world in all its rawness, weirdness, and inhuman form.

If you want real nature music, listen to Debussy's La Mer or Sibelius's Tapiola, music that does not flinch in creating elemental soundscapes that inspire and terrify, just like real nature does. This week, I might try turning the sound off, so that the images are left uninterpreted by Attenborough's cliche-ridden script or Fenton's bland orchestral soup. I'll let you know how it goes ...