Got the second question sorted now, thank you.
The first I am still struggling on. I have tried copying and pasting the code from the working search results page, but I don't think that's working because the searchbox isn't populated, so I have tried the DataAssist Search from the server behaviours panel, but again, I think I am struggling with the trigger. I have set a session of mrsSearchActive on the search-results.php page which works, but is being wiped out when returning to the page, so I think the events.php is killing that session... I've tried using the trigger of $_SESSION['mrsSearchActive'] and on page load, but no joy!
As it now stands at the mo, events.php is a standard page without any search code in it.