Star sighting! Was Maya Rudolph at Lake Burley Griffin last weekend?

It's always - always - worth following up such sightings. I mean, why wouldn't a major US star be down by the lake? It's a beautiful place to walk, and anyway, she may have been here for work.

For example, Canberra is fast developing a reputation for being a useful place to shoot car chase scenes for Hollywood movies, so anything's possible! Remember the Liam Neeson movie scene that features familiar parts of Civic, which apparently resemble a generic US city? Liam Neeson never appeared in person, but a man wearing a very realistic Liam Neeson mask sure did.

My first port of call was Screen Canberra; if any movie stars were in town for work, chief executive Holly Trueman and her team would surely know.

Dr Trueman was, like me, mystified. So I rang a former colleague who now works at the US Embassy and she, too, came back with nothing.

She did, though, impress me by knowing instantly, without prompting, who Maya Rudolph is. The vast majority of our team needed to place her in something, or look her up. A Bridesmaids reference was enough for some, long-running Saturday Night Live cast member worked for others.

One very senior team member gained clarity when told she was in the 2015 classic A Very Murray Christmas, which he was not ashamed to admit was a family favourite every festive season.

Another person who needed no prompting whatsoever was our intrepid entertainment reporter Amy Martin, who quickly began some serious Insta-digging.

As if we didn't need reminding how unlikely the sighting had been, Amy was quickly able to locate Maya Rudolph on the day in question at a party in LA hosted by Will Ferrell. Our subject was photographed at said party with Snoop Dogg so she clearly wasn't here in Canberra.

But I posited that perhaps, then, Will Ferrell had hosted said party in Canberra, and the sighting had been of Maya Rudolph working off a hangover in the time-honoured Canberra fashion, by walking around the lake.

Amy then pointed out that Jack Black, Sean Hayes, Jon Stewart, Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and the singer Beck were also at the party. It was becoming ever more unlikely that such a dazzling array of stars could have descended on the capital without us knowing.

Which led me to wonder why we don't get more incidental sightings of mega-stars walking the streets of Canberra. Obviously it's because they don't tend to visit here much, but why is this?

I'm excluding people like tennis star Nick Kyrgios. It may well thrill some to see him sauntering out of a Braddon restaurant or stopping to help push-start a stranger's car, but the man lives here.

And it's no help pointing out that John Cleese once stayed at Jamala Lodge at the zoo - he was touring here, and had obviously demanded the best and most exotic location Canberra had to offer. One with actual lions and monkeys, presumably.

Ditto the late, great Coolio who, though while he did find time to weigh in on Canberra's long-running and hot debate over the light rail back in 2018 - "I think a light rail system is dope" were his immortal words - he too was gearing up for a tour to the capital.

I doubt he would have walked around the lake the next morning. We would have known about it.

The closest we've had in recent years is a South Coast sighting of the Canberra-born actor Mia Wasikowska and her then boyfriend Jesse Eisenberg. But she was clearly on holidays with her family.

More stars should come here to take it the sights, visit the gallery, try out a new restaurant. As any politician can tell you, we Canberrans are cool as cucumbers whenever, say, the Prime Minister is spotted buying dog food for Toto at Woollies. We'd be just as likely to have left Maya Rudolph to her peaceful stroll last weekend, blessedly unmolested by autograph hunters.

At any rate, Thursday's buzz was short-lived; the person who had started it all later conceded that his wife did have conjunctivitis at the time she thought she may have seen Maya Rudolph down by the lake, and so may well have been mistaken.