Police 5 is a British television programme that reconstructs major unsolved crimes in order to gain information from the public which may assist in solving the case.
Police 5 was commissioned when Lew Grade needed a five-minute programme to fill a gap in the schedules for six weeks caused by an American import underrunning.
The idea came from Steve Wade, Head of Outside Broadcasts, and Grade refused to copyright the format,[citation needed] which allowed other ITV regions to launch their own versions with Taylor often hosting them.
The format was later sold overseas; in Germany it was a networked hour-long programme, Aktenzeichen XY… ungelöst (German for "Case number XY ... Unsolved") on ZDF since 1967, which became the blueprint for the BBC's Crimewatch (1984); Taylor had pitched the idea for a centralised version to Channel 4 in 1982 but the idea had been rejected.
At the age of 89, Taylor appeared on each half-hour programme for a short segment in which he “set out to reunite theft victims with what’s rightfully theirs”.