PHP & HTML: newbie question

Hi there I just signed up for an account at Spaceports so I can play with PHP ­ I placed some PHP code in an HTML page and uploaded it to the server. But when I checked it in my browser I got the error message: can¹t parse line 1 Line 1 is simply the <HTML> tag!! On one of their user forums someone suggested getting rid of the HTML tags so I did and just left the PHP code on its own and this works fine ­ so how can I use PHP with HTML? I think it has something to do with the fact that have to use their CGI server to run PHP??? Cheers Richard S