Yep it was a pain, I was looking at my code for a couple of days wondering why it wouldn't work - when there was nothing wrong with it. What else I notice is that sometimes when you write some code that 'should' work, you get an error such as a screen modal error or something else, sometimes I need to put in a few milliseconds delay before the code gets executed, and then it works fine - god only knows why???
Anyway it's all sorted now - thanks for your help.
Now I am on to learning about sqlite3 so I can add some favourites in a database as this is probably the best way to store data for a multi-content page. Ahh the joys of leaning a new language, and enigma2 (without hardly any decent documentation).