the_excerpt showing the whole post

Hey there,

I’ve got a theme i’m developing and we had the_excerpt working correctly and when i went back to work on some more code it appears to have stopped working. It shows the whole post.

Here is the code in the theme file:

<?php query_posts('cat=27&showposts=1'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div id="block-weather_watch_extras-0" class="block ">
        <h2 class="title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
          <?php the_title(); ?>
          </a>  </h2>
          <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { // check if the post has a Post Thumbnail assigned to it.
  the_post_thumbnail('medium');
} ?></a>

<?php the_content('<br /><br /><span class="readmore-icon">Read the rest of '. get_the_title($post->ID). '</span>', TRUE);?>

</div>
        <?php endwhile; endif; ?>

and this one is in the functions file.

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
	return 24;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

Thanks for your help ??