I've also worked as a DBA across a range of industries - Local Government, software vendor, charity, manufacturing, finance - and my experience tallies with yours, as far as the job is concerned the industry sector doesn't make huge amount of difference (certainly nothing like as much difference as individual company culture).

I think the kind of data that would make me more likely to want to get involved on the report writing side as an excuse to examine the data in detail would be social type data - the kind of thing a polling organization or the census department of government would have access to. To be more UK specific, having access to the Office of National Statistics databases would be very interesting.