Admittedly, it has been some years since I last flew albert, having been stuck behind a desk for almost a decade now, but I was glad for ASCOT - they sorted the dip clrs (a job that I know has got much harder post 9/11), teed-up all the onward stops when we inevitably went u/s and provided a single number we could call any time of the day or night if we had a problem and needed some support from home. The biggest ops faff of a route was always getting away from Lyneham and that had bugger all to do with ASCOT and was a Stn concern!
All it took to get a good service off ASCOT was to check in after each flight so that they could let us know if something went wrong beyond our fairly close horizon and spend a few minutes thinking of which solution we wanted to our problem and offering it up at the same time as the problem, as opposed to relying on them to figure it out. The way I looked at it, we were dealing with 1 task and they were dealing with about 40 (it was a bigger AT fleet back then!) so we had more time to figure out the best solution to our problem than they did!
At the end of the day, we were trying to do our job and they were trying to do theirs and we were both trying to achieve the same end goal. They were generally a good bunch with the odd dead-weight (much like ourselves). A little tolerance and understanding went a long way to making things run smoothly and I doubt that dealings with ASCOT are likely to be significantly changed since then.
Rodders: 'ITOC' course?