Everytime i try to continue game it shows background movement picture but never loads, if i press ps button to quit out it freezes my ps3 on a black screen forcing a complete manual shutdown. The game was playing without problems and there was no warning of this about to happen, any ideas?

Sounds like the autosave has corrupted the file used for continue, try loading an earlier savegame and see if it loads.

Using continue is never a good idea.

Top tip, if your console freezes with Skyrim, just eject the disc and wait, the console will soft reset which is much kinder to it.