Yet there she was this week in a pink shirt and sweaty hair, part of the cast on the new NBC reality series I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Hoping to be named “queen of the jungle”, she swallowed a tarantula one night and crawled through a muddy pit the next.

Participation in the series, taped in Costa Rica, is a move toward family redemption, both Blagojeviches have said, about picking up, moving on and making some money. But back home a lot of Chicago is wincing through the former first lady’s rain forest antics.

“I think she should be put in prison,” said Brian Sperry, 41, a sculptor who lives on the South Side.

Sperry’s friend Don Williams, a painter, said he caught Blagojevich’s performance on the series premiere Monday night. “I had to turn the channel,” he said.

In between building alliances with other contestants and trying to keep from being voted out of the jungle, Blagojevich has managed to bash old enemies, speak up for her husband and portray both of them as victims.

In various episodes she has cried, prayed, survived a near drowning and shown a side so tough that a rival player called her “a beast”.

Through all that, she has proved perhaps the most stable-minded of the celebrity roster, which includes the former model Janice Dickinson, the reality stars Heidi and Spencer Pratt of the MTV series The Hills and John Salley, a former pro basketball player. Whatever her strategy, it seems to be working: her fellow celebrities voted to grant her immunity from rejection by viewers in the first round of eliminations.

Too bad it’s not real life. Back in Illinois, the children’s charity that she had chosen as one beneficiary of her appearance on the show said thanks, but no thanks. Why? The charity has an alliance with a hospital that prosecutors accused Blagojevich of shaking down for a campaign donation.

Kim Banks, a social worker from West Side of Chicago, said that she had not known much about the former Governor’s wife until now and that she was watching the show. “I feel sorry for her,” she said. “But I also don’t blame her. She’s got kids to feed. I understand that.”