Slovenia 3

For most of the week, Slovenia 3 television isn't very exciting. More or less a public-information channel, Slovenia 3 intersperses static ad pages with grainy live feeds from cameras placed around the old city of Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. During a one-hour period, a viewer can expect to see a few spots for English-language courses, Internet consulting firms, chic new restaurants — typical enterprises in post-Iron Curtain central Europe — and long pans of the city's many picturesque squares, parks and churches.

But between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, Slovenia 3 sheds its pedestrian daytime visage and becomes the go-to place for the country's sexually frustrated. For those three-hour periods, the station broadcasts nothing but hardcore pornography.

Keep in mind that Slovenia is not a particularly lascivious country, nor is Ljubljana the sort of place one might expect to find porn on public television. It is a small nation, just 2 million citizens, with a bustling post-communist economy. Visit Slovenia and you are bound to think, "hey, this is a place that is too busy for hardcore porn."

But there it is. Three solid hours.

The porn is not actually a part of Slovenia 3, but rather a borrowed feed from a station called SCT, whose origins are vague but whose taste in pornography are both eclectic and precise. According to Bill Wilson, an English teacher in Ljubljana, "any given installment can include Italian, Dutch, American or German porn, with varying degrees of hardness and excitement. Do you hit gold with a German anal orgy, a solid fantasy night of Italians fucking in the midst of Venetian carnival scenes with all those terrific costumes, or do you crap out with an assemblage of air-brushed, tit-stuffed American tripe with those excrutiatingly drawn-out and fully clothed 'plot building scenes' thrown between every scrap of straight on types of sex acts — plain-Jane threesomes at best." Part of what makes Slovenia 3's porn programming so shocking is its format — or the lack thereof. At 12:59 a.m. you can still find lovely, if somewhat indistinct, night shots of Ljubljana's historic Preseren Square. But as soon as the clock strikes 1, the screen is filled with hot anal action, or girl-on-girl or whatever fits the programmers' fancy. No transition, no introductory music, nothing. Often the porn will begin in media res, with a couple engaged in a heavy fisting session, or perhaps with a salad in mid-toss. There is nothing more jarring, really, than a close-up shot of a well-oiled anus at 1 a.m.

While Slovenia 3 never provides background, or even the most basic context, for its porn — titles, actors — it's clearly amateur, with the emphasis on the act rather than the actors. In fact, most of the people seen on Slovenia 3 wouldn't make it in the Valley, much less into a late-night Cinemax sexcom a la "The Red Show Diaries." Love handles and droopy appendages abound, and for some reason the more bizarre the act, the more unattractive the actors.

When the act reaches its climax, the clip is immediately replaced by another, and so on, with no real logic behind their order. Then, at 4 a.m. sharp, the porn ends and the tranquil shots of early-morning Ljubljana begin again. It's abrupt enough to make the whole experience seem a bad dream.

But far from being a dream, Slovenia 3/SCT is the perfect symbol for contemporary life in a post-Communist country. Twenty years ago, late-night Slovenian TV probably consisted of a guy at a desk reading Marx, if anything at all. But now, in a region awash in money and freedom, the pendulum has swung the other way. The end of ideology is here, and it is X-rated.

Slovenia 3's programming methods may be inexplicable, but its message isn't — we are free to do what we want, and what we want is to watch porn. And only the basest, most extreme porn will do. Best of all, no one will stop us. And if that's not the spirit of capitalism in a nutshell, what is?

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)