Without question, Balloon Boy was the television highlight of 2009. It had it all – drama, excitement.

The possibility of dead children. Everything. But it appears that the Colorado judicial system doesn’t take the same glee in watching what was assumed to be a suffocated toddler flying through the air for several hours before crashing to earth in a giant inflatable UFO as everyone else – it has just sent Richard and Mayumi Heene, the parents behind the Balloon Boy hoax, to jail for mucking everyone around.

You have to admit, it’s an unusual punishment – usually when a couple of parents are as transparently awful as Richard and Mayumi Heene, they’re simply given their own reality TV show.

Even more than usual, 2009 has been a year marked by deeply irresponsible parenting. As well as old favourites like Michael Lohan threatening to kidnap his daughter, we were treated to brave new up-and-comers like Octomom (decided to have eight children at once on purpose), the Duggar family (enough children to start and maintain the world’s most profitable organ-harvesting company) and Jon and Kate Gosselin (she – smacking her children and depriving them of water; he – shagging a nanny in a hot tub while the kids slept).

For most of the year, it seemed like a neck-and-neck race to see who’d get crowned as 2009′s Most Jaw-Droppingly Oafish parents – and then Richard and Mayumi Heene came along. You’ll know Richard and Mayumi Heene better as the Balloon Boy parents – the people who decided to set a giant foil UFO-shaped helium balloon spinning for 50 miles in the skies above Colorado while telling news stations and the emergency services that their six-year-old son was somehow trapped inside it. It was hilarious.

In fact, we don’t know what was more hilarious – the part where the balloon crashed to the ground and everyone expected to see a dead child flop out of it, the part where Richard and Mayumi Heene admitted that it was all a hoax to help them land their own reality show, or the part where the estimated cost of the rescue operation reached $2 million.

No, actually, the most hilarious bit came yesterday, when the Balloon Boy parents admitted being gigantic bellends in court and were sentenced to jail. That was genuinely quite hilarious. BBC News reports:

A US man who triggered a major alert by falsely claiming his son was adrift in a helium balloon has been sentenced to 90 days in jail – and his wife to 20. In court in Colorado, Heene appeared to fight back tears as he apologised to rescue workers and the community, saying he was “very, very sorry”. The judge also… banned them from receiving any form of financial benefit from the case.

Honestly, when did it become so wrong for a hard-working father to try and earn a bit of honest money by pretending that his own son had probably suffocated to death inside a giant out-of-control UFO? If that sort of behaviour is wrong, we don’t want to be right.

Still, 2009 is almost over, and it’s all to play for in 2010. Other irresponsible celebrity parents, this is what you have to beat. You might be down at the moment, Jon Gosselin, but we have faith in you. Next year, you’ll really bugger up the psychological well-being of your children! You can do it!

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