Passing a parameter to a permalink

I'm trying to create permalinks for a page that currently has parameters passed to it. The site was set up by somebody else and I'm not familiar with Wordpress

I have various pages which have URLs of the form /events/single-event/?u_name=event_name/ e.g. /events/single-event/?u_name=Hippy

I would like to be able to access these various pages via /something/event_name/ where I'm not too fussy about what something is. something can have a slash in it if required.

I've had a go at setting this up via RewriteRule in .htaccess but haven't had any luck.

Can someone suggest how I can achieve this?

Many thanks