The flamboyant Prince, who became the highest-paid performer in popular music this month, is the high-stepping subject of an entertaining television biography Saturday on a new cable series called ``Rave.``
``Rave`` will premiere at 10 p.m. (it will be reshown at 2 a.m.) on A&E, which calls the series a ``performing arts showcase.`` The host is Ann Magnuson, best known for her portrayal of magazine editor Catherine Hughes on the ``Anything But Love`` comedy series.
Magnuson has comparatively little to do, because the hour is mostly consumed by ``The Prince of Paisley Park,`` a documentary produced by the BBC. It skips about through Prince`s career from 1979 until this year.
This biography was completed before Sept. 3, when Prince signed a $100 million deal with Warner Bros. Records, which named him a vice president of the company and agreed to pay him $10 million per album, starting with his next one next month.
His nine-figure deal topped recent eight-figure pacts by Madonna, who signed with Time Warner Inc. for $60 million this year, and Michael Jackson, who settled for $50 million from the Sony Corp. last year.
Prince, 34, was named Prince Rogers Nelson when he was born in Minneapolis, the son of a jazz musician. He burst into stardom 13 years ago with his third album, ``Dirty Mind.``
``Prince was not really shocking until the `Dirty Mind` album,`` critic Nelson George says in the show. ``The first two albums, he was sort of a cute little Stevie Wonderesque kind of guy.`` That image changed sharply, George recalls, when Prince started strutting on stage in costumes including ``high- heel suede boots, black bikini underwear. He profited from building a mystique: Is he a boy? Is he a girl? Is he black, is he white? That drew us in, made us listen to the music more closely.``
If the music hadn`t been worth listening to, Prince probably wouldn`t have lasted any longer than Boy George, another androgynous artist, who enjoyed only a brief career. Instead, Prince grew steadily more popular through the first half of the 1980s, an establishing phase of his career culminating with his ``Purple Rain`` album in 1984.
This adulatory hour chooses to mostly avoid discussion of Prince`s movies, such as ``Purple Rain`` (1984) and ``Under the Cherry Moon`` (1986), which have mostly been turkeys.
A bigger hole in the show is that it includes no comments from Prince himself.
Clips from many of Prince`s music videos are presented, ranging in time from 1980s hits like ``When Doves Cry`` down to 1991 crowd-pleasers like
``Cream`` and ``Gett Off.``
No song is shown in its entirety, however, which may aggravate you after a while. Call it ``music interruptus.``
On the plus side, the BBC was allowed to peep inside Paisley Park, the $10 million complex Prince built in his hometown.
Numerous naysayers thought it would just be some kind of grotesque toy, Prince`s version of Graceland, but it has proven to be a successful production facility.