I've never seen Black Books but that was a big Channel 4 series that occupied the same Friday night timeslot between Spaced and The IT Crowd. And I only really first became aware of the whole Linehan situation from the
mention in Pottergame!
There's not too much like The IT Crowd (Channel 4 moved on to The Inbetweeners as their big show after The IT Crowd came to an end, but that's never been appealing to me. I think that was the point at which I realised that I had 'aged out' of their demographics), but I'd use a search on the actors in the show to check out other things - for instance Matt Berry and Noel Fielding were in the surrealist The Mighty Boosh. Berry and Richard Ayoade came from Gath Marenghi's Darkplace (one of the best series Channel 4 did). Peter Serafinowicz was part of the Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright gang (he's in Spaced and the roommate in Shaun of the Dead) and together with Robert Popper created the fantastic loving parody of 1970s/1980s Schools programmes
Look Around You. (I still laugh at the wordplay of the "Look out for the new albumin... it's out now!" line from the narrator in one experiment involving eggs).
Olivia Colman is in the second series of Look Around You, where it went from ten minute programmes to a full blown half hour parody of the BBC's 1980s 'future-tech' Tomorrow's World series. Colman is also one of the main supporting players in the Mitchell and Webb show ("
I see you've... started... Blacking up again") which was
fantastic, particularly in the way that it brutally satirised
the format of television, and
gameshows with the increasingly convoluted Numberwang. And then ended its entire run with the
most tear-jerking sketch since the end of Blackadder Goes Forth.
In terms of drama-comedies, I quite like
Friday Night Dinner, although
Two Doors Down much more. From the 2000s, I
loved The Smoking Room (which might actually be close to The IT Crowd!) although that series was a casualty of the changing times, being cancelled due to becoming an anachronism once the indoor smoking ban came into effect. I don't smoke, but Robert Webb's deadpan and sarcastic character in that was otherwise all too relatable! And I also like the really radical way that each episode is temporally contained within a single half-hour break with the various combinations of characters coming in and out of the room during each episode, and with no underscore aside from the opening and closing titles. There's been nothing quite like that series since, sadly. Its probably the best piece of media about office workers since Il Posto!