Good evening Tom and welcome to the Events Calendar Support forum!
Thank you for reaching out to us.
We are sorry to hear that you are struggling using shortcodes. Yikes!
I would love to help you with this topic.
As a first troubleshooting step, could you please provide us with your complete system information in a private reply using the instructions found in the following link?
https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/
Secondly, could you try changing the setting for Events Template under Events -> Settings -> Display and see if this helps ?
Let me know how that goes.
Best regards,
Geoff B.