It’s been a terrible and terribly strange 10 days. My girlfriend and I were having breakfast on a beach in the Maldives when the sea level suddenly rose to our waists. We raced to find our children — and found one neck-deep in water, surrounded by floating furniture. Two others were sitting scared on a bench 50 yards inland.

We thought it was a local thing and a great adventure. Then eight hours later someone got a television working and we learnt of the true and horrible cause.

Two days later we got home and, ever since then, it has just got worse: the number of the dead rising every day, the fear of more deaths through disease, and the knowledge of how hard the lives of even the survivors will now be.

It’s also been strange because I had written a New Year’s Day episode of the Vicar of Dibley to try to move people to thinking about how terrible the lives of the poor are. We’d thought it would come in the context of a low-calibre news week, lots of stuff about the sales and Romeo Beckham’s Christmas gifts — but instead it was screened on a day when every single person in the country was deeply, horrifically aware of the precariousness of life, particularly for the poor.

Now I’m being asked what effect the tsunami will have on our campaign this year to try to make poverty history — a campaign to create a popular movement that pushes politicians in the G8 countries once and for all to take decisive steps to eradicate extreme poverty. An action which is actually within G8 members’ power in this extraordinary political year — when Britain is both chairman of this club of rich nations and president of the European Union — if they adopt a crucial cocktail of debt cancellation, more and better aid, and trade justice.

What I hope is this: that this terrible tragedy will increase people’s passion to see something radical done for the poor this year. The tsunami is the most horrific demonstration of what is actually going on in the world every single day, in secret, away from the news.

The waves took 150,000 lives or more. The silent disaster of poverty claims a similar number of children every five days — 30,000 every single day. They die from lack of food and clean water. They die in their thousands from curable diseases such as pneumonia, measles and malaria — and from a simple malady like diarrhoea that is just a joke to me and the kids. They die from Aids, often contracted from their mother’s milk. They die the day they are born for lack of basic natal care. In the UK, one in 143 children dies before their fifth birthday. In some countries in Africa that figure is one in four.

Every day of the year we watch the news, and they forget to add that item. “Chelsea won again — oh, and 30,000 people died who didn’t have to.” “The Incredibles went back to number one at the box office — oh, and 30,000 real people died totally avoidably.”

What we have seen over the past few days, in the astonishing generosity of the public around the world, is that faced by the reality of unnecessary death people are massively generous and massively concerned. And countries can suddenly, quite rightly, find large reserves of money — just as they’ve always been able to do when a Black Wednesday hits the economy or there’s a war to be fought.

I’d ask people not to forget their passion of the last fortnight. Hold on to it.

My friend Kevin says that it’s as if we are all living with an elephant standing in our living rooms but we just don’t see it: this huge, simple truth that 15m people will die preventable deaths this year — twice the population of London. We know how to stop it happening but we haven’t yet convinced our politicians that we will not tolerate it any more.

I, of all people, know how wonky my priorities are and probably will be again. I’ve spent the past 10 years trying to convince people that tragedy consists of poor Hugh Grant having a tiny tiff with Julia Roberts and then wandering through Notting Hill to the tune of another great Sixties classic.

I was deeply chilled by one sentence about the tsunami that was published recently, a description of bodies on the beach. The writer was there, he’d seen death, and his last sentence was: “And I thought heartbreak hurt.”