This year’s Academy Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the Canadian television industry, goes to Michael Maclear, chairman of Toronto’s Screenlife Productions and Leading Cases Productions.

Maclear came to Canada nearly 50 years ago after some time as a cub reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He joined the CBC as a news writer in 1955, finding himself doing the job no one else wanted – writing copy for the film clips generated by the wire services. That led to a position in Tokyo as the CBC’s first Far East correspondent, followed by a similar assignment in London.

Although it’s difficult to pick highlights in a five-decade career, some of Maclear’s most notable work has been done relating to the Vietnam War. First visiting the country in the Quiet American days of 1959, Maclear’s Vietnam experiences include being the first journalist to interview American POWs in captivity and being the first allowed to report from North Vietnam during the conflict.

‘Reporters who think they know their territory [are suffering under] a preconception,’ says Maclear of his arrival in the uncharted north. ‘Being in China at the start of the Cultural Revolution, I expected to find a very similar society when I went to North Vietnam – a robotic society. The biggest surprise for me when I first went to Hanoi was that it was very openly nationalist. There was an ordinary circus performing in the park. There were lovers strolling by the lake. There was a total lack of propaganda. My first impression – but it gradually became a lasting one – was that the cause was much more one of nationalism than communism, and I think time proved that.

‘When we were filming there, no one had filmed… the four or five years of bombing. We traveled down through the demilitarized zone, and every town and city had been devastated. Just getting people to believe the footage and the facts was difficult… Sometimes you do a story and half the challenge is to get people to accept that it is reality.’

Maclear became an independent filmmaker and author in 1978, producing the landmark Vietnam series The Ten Thousand Day War. He found the indie world much more satisfying.

‘The biggest restriction when you’re a correspondent working for a network is simply competing to get on air,’ he notes. ‘And even if you do, it is pretty confined – a one- or two-minute report, depending on the scope of your story. By definition it becomes simplistic. And if you’re covering wars and turmoil, it also tends to become repetitive. I often think the correspondent becomes a caricature of himself.’

Beyond his work as executive producer on History’s Courtroom, a doc program about legal systems over the last century for History Television, Maclear has several projects in the works, including a retrospective of his time in Vietnam, also for History.