Well, I know that if you take one of those devices that produces high voltage streaks inside a glass dome and hold a florescent tube near it, the gas in the portion of the tube between your hand and the dome will become excited and light up.
Thanks for the idea sputnik.
But the circuit I am talking about works on the basis that a fused tube has at least one working filament.
This simple circuit was pretty popular during my school days and I remember building a few of them myself using diodes etc.It lights up like a normal tube.
I do not remember the details (it was long ago).
I conected a removable 8W fluorescent tube (model without electronic , originally to work with a choke and starter device) to electronic circuit from broken compact tube (the glass part of compact tube was broken).
It worked, the filement was not connected (pre-warm-up was not necessary).