TV Tonight: Albanian Mafia Investigation Leads a Packed Schedule

A 9pm documentary on Sky Documentaries tops tonight's television: The Drug Lords Next Door, in which correspondent John Sparks investigates how the Albanian mafia cornered the UK cocaine market. The film, reviewed here by Jack Seale, describes an operation that now dominates a trade of massive scale.

Sparks works methodically. He sets out three factors behind Albanian dominance: buying directly from South American cartels, violently expelling all rivals, and embracing technology. Seale calls the result "an absorbing investigation" that explains how the Albanians came "to rule" one of Britain's most lucrative illegal markets.

What else airs tonight?

Children in Need 2026, 7pm, BBC One. The annual fundraiser broadcasts live from Salford. Mel Giedroyc, Sara Cox, Alex Jones, Rylan and Tyler West host, while Owain Wyn Evans arrives in the studio after completing a 400-mile cycling challenge. Phil Harrison predicts "the usual mix of heart-tugging appeals and pill-sweetening comedy" from what he terms this year's "bumper portion of worthy charity cheese".

Unreported World, 7.30pm, Channel 4. Guillermo Galdos fronts a film from Juárez, Mexico, gaining access to the city's drug cartel. The reporting finds gangsters recruited at horrifyingly young ages, including a 13-year-old hitman. On a more hopeful note, Galdos also visits rehabilitation facilities working to rescue children from the cartels.

War, 9pm, Sky Atlantic. The penultimate episode brings Morgan and Carla, played by Dominic West and Sienna Miller, their day in court. Johnny's treacheries threaten to overwhelm him as the legal drama sharpens. Harrison's verdict: "a twisty, nasty delight".

The Graham Norton Show, 10.40pm, BBC One. Cynthia Erivo, David Tennant and Laura Linney lead the guest list. Graeme Virtue flags a dark horse in Rob Brydon, who recently played a US chatshow host in the horror film Clayface, and wonders whether the seat might tempt him. Noah Kahan supplies the music.

Grimsburg, 11.30pm, Sky One. The animated sitcom's ribald impulses are offset, Virtue writes, by the growing bond between hard-boiled detective Marvin, voiced by Jon Hamm, and his estranged son Stan, voiced by Rachel Dratch. A silly plot device makes father and son switch bodies, testing whether their rapprochement survives.

Film of the night: Being Heumann

The pick is Being Heumann (Siân Heder, 2026) on Apple TV, a fact-based drama about Judith Heumann, the American whom Simon Wardell notes has been called the "mother of the disability rights movement" despite remaining little known in the UK.

Ruth Madeley, in Wardell's words a "brilliant" choice for the role, plays Heumann as a complex figure: inspiring but dominating, passionate yet at times difficult to deal with. The film centres on her leadership of what Wardell calls a coalition of the rejected, wheelchair users alongside blind and deaf activists, who occupied a federal building in San Francisco in 1977. Their protest targeted the failure to sign regulations banning state discrimination against disabled people. Wardell praises "a rousing tale" that shows the fight for equality "is still far from a done deal".

Live sport

• Nations Championship rugby: France v South Africa, 7.15pm, ITV1, from the Stade de France in Paris.
• Uefa Nations League football: Scotland v North Macedonia, 7.30pm, BBC Two, from Hampden Park.

What does tonight change for viewers? It offers a rare combination: hard investigative reporting on an organised-crime story that rarely reaches the screen with this clarity, alongside a disability-rights drama with an awards-calibre central performance, and a full slate of live sport in between.