Selective 301 redirections of pages within folders to single URL

Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow!

The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued.

The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are still giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic.

If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly.

I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the 400+ redirects are working correctly.

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#Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am trying to redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items that refuse to redirect:
Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical...recorded-fora/

Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical...recorded-fora/

Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical...recorded-fora/

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#Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage? Or will a simple 301 ignoring the the extra gubbins at the end be sufficient.

RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L]
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#On the old site many news directories (blog posts effectively) contained articles that are unmatched on the new site. I have attempted to redirect them all to a new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles, in each year directory, back to the top level news page. (When I have tried adding a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct.)

Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me ;-) My logic here was - rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same).

So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received.

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*)\.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*)\.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

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Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.