OK, think I have worked it out, although I have got to write the PHP to fix it yet.
I was (wrongly) thinking that the "mysql_fetch_assoc" was returning an associated array, when in fact it is simply returning a text srting as it only returns one element.
I will therefore use the explode command (with a delimiter of say <br>) and then use only the first 5 elements of that array.
Thanks for the help Craig...