Backlight out on iMac G4 FP

I'm currently sourcing a cheap monitor to plug in for the time being, but in the meantime, I wonder if anyone has had a similar experience.
Heath Raftery wrote on :

The backlight is out on my 1.25GHz flat panel (hemisphere base) G4 iMac, meaning the display is present, but very dark and quite unuseable. I'm currently sourcing a cheap monitor to plug in for the time being, but in the meantime, I wonder if anyone has had a similar experience.

I pulled the machine apart and couldn't find anything obviously wrong with the internals in the base. I tried to pull the screen apart, but apart from breaking all the plastic tabs on the front cover and removing the three allen key screwns at the bottom of the screen, I was unable to make any progress. I suspect, with old CRT monitors being quite cheap, that it's just not worth pursuing, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

This is the 17" model. Several weeks back the display actually lost one of its colours (red I think - the result was a nasty screen-wide tinge), but the old pull it apart and put it back together trick fixed that. Since then there had been no problems until suddenly the backlight was out one morning.