over the years I have tended to JPEG photos but now I am getting more serious I am thinking of shooting in raw and using lightroom to import and then make better

I have lightroom on the laptop but am woefully ignorant about how to use it

is there a decent online resource to show me how to use it without too much pain?

there are plenty of youtube videos which I will crack on with but I wondered if there was anything that any of you specifically recommend?

Check out:

https://www.goaskerin.com/

She has free and paid tutorials

This has a paid course, but does cover all the basics to get you going as well as a couse in Photoshop. I took the Fine Art Landscape course at one time and it was pretty good. Many folks use PS in conjunction with the Adobe Raw product to do edits, so you have some flexibility. Raw is basically the same editing engine behind LR and the UIs are very similar, and if you have the Photo package with Adobe Creative Cloud, you get Raw as part of the monthly subscription in addition to other tools.

Photoshop Course for Photographers | Learn Photo Editing Online